Blue Pencil

Yes, we can!

2008-01-14T04:00:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama's stirring post-New Hampshire "Yes, we can!" speech summoned up echoes of Rosie the Riveter's "We can do it!" (Si se puede!) However what I heard most - coming from the next room in a piping two-year-old voice, in fact - was the theme song to Bob the Builder:

Bob the Buildo
Tan we fits it?
Bob the Buildo
Yets we tan!

A more serious person - or perhaps less serious, on second consideration - would consider the implications of this, regarding a candidate's appeal to the Soccer Mom vote. Not that I would consider myself a soccer mom, an understanding of organized sports and minivans being foreign to this household. If I identify with anything, it's this line from Michele Shocked's 1988 song, "Anchorage": " I sound like a housewife. Hey Chel, I think I'm a housewife."

That aside, I don't see any reason to analyze the allusions of Obama's excellent speechwriter, although before my mention of any candidate is seen as an endorsement (and you know they're all pining for Blue Pencil's approval!), let me point to Democracy Now's very interesting interview with journalists Kelley Vlahos and Allen Nairn, who demonstrated that the political advisers and, to some extent, funding sources of the top candidates of both parties were essentially the same. Make of that what you will.

No, I find Bob the Builder a much more fruitful source of study. I'm not a fan, just an unwilling bystander in the daily worship of Bob. So may I just say that the following stanza is driving me crazy:

Pilchard and Bird
Travis and Spud
Working together
Like good friends should.

I don't think you can use the phrase "slant rhyme" unless an actual poet is involved - and let me tell you, Emily Dickinson this ain't.

So what's to be done? (About Bob, that is, not about single-payer health insurance, for which I obviously have an answer.) I'm racking my brain for an alternative. Will you, Dear Reader, provide a better rhyme? Working together, we can make a better America.

The Ride - wherever life takes you

2007-12-20T17:40:00.000-05:00

This was going to be a post about word choices and the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority's bus system - and may yet be - but first I want to talk about snow.

We are all bus enthusiasts in our household, partly out of laziness (bus stop around the corner with a bus that takes us downtown - no search for parking! no search for quarters to pay for it!) and partly out of a feeling that we should take advantage of mass transportation if we want it to continue to exist. Both our boys started riding the bus as newborns tucked into slings, prompting other riders to ask, "Hey! You got a baby in there?" Older Son learned his numbers by the bus routes and now, at age 7, is very capable of giving route recommendations to visitors to our town. We look forward to the day when we can hand him a bus pass and say, "Go forth, young man!"

When the weather turns bad and we have to abandon our bikes for days or weeks at a time, we especially depend on the bus. With cars sliding all over the roads, I like the feeling of being in a nice big bus driven by someone with special training. So particularly during these snowy days, we have to be able to get to the bus stop. Our neighbors are very good at shoveling their sidewalks, but there are two places that tend to be obscured by snowdrifts: curb cuts and the bus stops themselves. This is because no one is responsible for clearing them, and city snowplows clearing the streets push packed snow up against the curbs. It doesn't matter how beautifully the sidewalks are shoveled if you can't get off them at the corners, and it doesn't matter how faithful bus service is if you can't make it to the bus door from the sidewalk. This problem is particularly trying for those of us who struggle to push children in strollers.

Yesterday I decided to take matters into my own hands. When I set off to pick up Older Son from school, I stuck our short shovel on top of the stroller and tried to keep it from falling on Younger Son, who naturally insisted on running alongside the stroller. Between the walk there and the walk back, I was able to clear most of the obstructed curb cuts - after a fashion. But I'm beat. This is clearly not a sustainable solution.

At dinner, our family discussed other options, and we came up with a plan: follow the model of stretches of highway shoulder (or further out - what is that called, the elbow?) that are adopted by various civic organizations, who undertake to clear litter and otherwise keep the area groomed. Perhaps the city could have organizations adopt corners and bus stops. I picture little signs underneath the route markers and street signs publicizing the name of the generous organizations.

If we as a community wish to attract more bus riders for whatever reason, we have to make it easy for them. And why not make it easy for everyone who already rides the bus while we're at it?

Now, about those word choices. Not that the AATA asked my opinion - does anyone? - but when you hear something over and over, it works its annoying way into your brain. In this case, it's the following recording by the pleasant-voiced Bus Lady, heard several times every trip:

Please remember to take your personal items with you when exiting the bus.

I don't have a background in public health, but I find personal items conjures up used Kleenex - or worse. While I'm sure the AATA doesn't want that sort of thing littering their buses, somehow I don't think that's what they had in mind. What's wrong with the word belongings? As for exiting the bus - isn't it grammatically suspect? I suppose the 'you are' is implied by the earlier 'your,' but I don't like it. And there is the faintest whiff, to my ears, of someone barely restraining him- or herself from using a horrific parallel to the non-word deplane. Debus? Let's hope not. As a first draft, may I respectfully suggest:

When you get off the bus, please look around to make sure you aren't leaving anything behind.

It's a little wordy, but there isn't a mother who doesn't say the equivalent twenty times a day. Everyone who is or has a mother should be able to relate.

Finally, the bus geeks in our family (namely, all of us) are thrilled by the AATA's new fleet of hybrid electric buses. Our hearts swell with pride here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor. However, a flier announcing their implementation proclaimed For Cleaner Air and a Brighter Future. The cleaner air part is perfectly straightforward, but I'm afraid the brighter future bit sounds unthought-out. How, brighter? In fact, given recent pronouncements about global warming, our future may be a lot brighter than we'd like it to be. Let's be fashionable, and go with a greener future.

All of us would like to take this opportunity to thank the bus drivers and other AATA employees, who make it possible for us to go where we need to go.

Saturday's child works hard for a living

2007-12-19T15:05:00.000-05:00

At the suggestion of loyal reader Mary Jean, I turn to Ian McEwan's 2005 novel, Saturday, in which London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne lives one extraordinarily long and eventful day. Mary Jean called my attention to the sole American character, Jay Strauss, who serves as Henry's anesthesiologist (in the U.K. anaesthetist) and squash partner. I must admit that initially I was so caught up by the breadth of the story and characters - doctors, lawyers, urban hoods, blues guitar, poetry, a peace march, a fish shop, a squash court - that I didn't notice anything amiss with Jay's speech. But I returned to it, partially because I felt that any novelist who could reproduce the intricacies of brain surgery at length could surely handle a few paragraphs of American dialect. After all, it's hardly brain surgery, is it?

Henry has his anesthesiologist running interference between a problem patient and the hospital staff:

It took Jay Strauss, an American with the warmth and directness that no one else in this English hospital could muster, to bring her [the problem patient] into line.

"Listen, honey. You want us to fix that sorry head of yours, you've got to help us. You hear? You don't want us to fix it, take your attitude home. We got plenty of other patients waiting to get in your bed. Look, here's your stuff in the locker. You want me to start putting it in your bag? OK. Here we go. Toothbrush. Discman. Hairbrush...No? So which is it to be? Fine. OK, look, I'm taking them out again. No, look, I really am. You help us, we help you. We got a deal? Let's shake hands."

Clearly, the phrase in red is the chief offender - an American would say, So what's it gonna be? But that aside, I wonder who the model for Jay Strauss was. We Americans are by definition a mongrel bunch, but it seems to me that many Americans of the British imagination are an unlikely blend of Wild West Cowboy, New York Hot Dog Vendor, Inbred Southerner, and Midwestern Ugly Tourist. Of course, we Americans respond with equally fallacious portraits of the English, but that is material for another post - if not another blog. I often yearn to know more about Americans like Jay Strauss: Where did he grow up? Where are his parents from? Where did he go to school? What do his vowels sounds like? How I would love to give him the linguist's merry/marry/Mary test!

What I do know is either that Jay's many years in London have influenced his vocabulary, or McEwan's editors are deficient. (Mr. McEwan, I'm here for you! My rates are reasonable, and my vowels - a confusion of New York, Expat, and Midwestern - are authentic, if completely inconsistent.)

Later in the novel, Jay tells Henry:

"Sally Madden went home with the flu an hour ago, so I've got Rodney. The kid's keen and he's good and he doesn't want you in here. But Henry, we have a depressed fracture over the sinus."
Perowne clears his thoat. "Boggy swelling?"
"Right on the spot. ..."

I can't imagine keen being used in this sense by an American. My perception of the word's usage here revolves around a dungareed eight-year-old in 1955 discovering a cereal box toy or creating a new soap box racer. I would have Jay say, The kid's raring to go or The kid's up for it. And Right on the spot should obviously be Right on the dot.

Small matters, it goes without saying, in the middle of a very fine novel - one which includes the theme of the power of words to change reality. Need I say more?

Call the whole thing off?

2007-12-08T21:15:00.000-05:00

Moving from print to the mass media, I'm catching up with my commercial TV watching through the graces of my public library's excellent collection of series on DVD. I'm watching 2004's House M.D., which follows the exploits of the Chief of Diagnostics at a large New Jersey hospital. Those who know me will be amused to find me so absorbed by a hospital series - this is the same person who just wrote one of her law school application essays on her insistence on a homebirth (it was relevant, really!). We're drawn to what repels us, I guess.

Actually, House M.D. is not bad - it's essentially a medical mystery show. My chief complaint is that a job requirement for the two main female characters seems to be shirts unbuttoned to the point where I worry for their safety from protruding medical equipment. After many years of breastfeeding, I've suffered a severe reduction in my sense of modesty (if in nothing else) on that front. But I'm fairly sure that Drs. Cuddy and Cameron are not making themselves accessible in order to encourage compliance with World Health Organization recommendations for extended breastfeeding. These ladies are broadcasting another message entirely. I'm tempted to demand - if nothing else - parity for those of us who enjoy looking at men's bodies too, but that's another discussion.

The episode in question, "Poison," concerns a high school student suffering dire consequences as a result of his exposure to some unknown toxin. In the course of investigating probable causes, the team searches through the pantry at the boy's home. Cameron remarks, "Mom's not too careful with the homemade tomato sauce," and the jar is removed to the hospital to be tested for botulinum spores.

If I may digress for a moment, I was surprised that canned tomatoes would be considered a danger for causing botulism, since they are so acidic. My impression was that low-acid foods, such as a the fatal green beans in Carol Shields' wonderful novel, Larry's Party, were the greatest risk. However, I'm no expert, and I freely admit that taking health advice from someone who gets her information from fiction is probably less safe than other options.

Now - back to our tomato sauce. Such was my ignorance of all things TV, that I didn't realize until I had watched several episodes that Hugh Laurie, the (apparently quite famous) actor playing Dr. Gregory House, is in fact English, in spite of his excellent impersonation of an American on the show. But then, all of a sudden, a relatively subtle variation in pronunciation made me sit up straight.

House says to his team: "I send you out for exciting new designer drugs--you come back with tomato sauce." Such an accomplished actor would not make the obvious to-may-to vs. to-mah-to mistake (thank you, George and Ira Gershwin, for so many things!). But his word stress gives him away: instead of the American to-MAY-to sauce, Laurie says to-may-to SAUCE. It's just not plausible. I suppose a New Englander of a certain generation - think Julia Child - might conceivably use the British stress, but not combined with the American vowel. And House's character is in the middle of Jersey, where the Julias of speech do not commonly roam freely.

David Lodge - whose American I mercilessly dissected in an earlier post - had his scriptwriter in Therapy admit that TV shows might be nonsense, but they are perfect nonsense. If I believe that, I would find this tomato sauce problem to be a fatal flaw. A quick search online revealed another minutiae-obsessed blogger, who found a problem with Laurie's pronunciation of "sandwich." I'm inclined to be forgiving - generous of me, isn't it? - if only because the tomato sauce turned out not to be the culprit in the episode. The source was a pesticide-impregnated pair of pants the boy had purchased from a man in a truck. So, all previous warnings against taking safety advice from fiction notwithstanding, I encourage those of you who find new sweaters under the paper and ribbons this holiday season to wash before wearing.

There you go - TV has saved another life, somewhere. Happy holidays.

Law and philosophy

2007-11-29T06:50:00.000-05:00

Welcome back, readers. Why the long absence? I am involved in my own feature-length drama, which might be entitled Blue Pencil Applies to Law School. At this point, the genre alternates between autobiography (otherwise known as the Personal Statement), thriller, and mystery - the last of which refers to the cryptic path through various bureaucracies. Any critics of web interfaces in search of an easy target might turn their attention to the Law School Admission Council. I, however, will stick to my traditional cavils, at least for the moment.

I came late to the South African/Australian novelist J.M. Coetzee, winner of many awards, including the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. I was drawn to his 2003 novel, Elizabeth Costello, by its blurb in the Daedalus Books catalog, in which the main character is described as "a distinguished Australian novelist whose life is revealed through a series of eight formal addresses." This gives the impression of a bare collection of speeches, but in reality all eight are framed in conventional narrative and dialogue, sufficient to provide the reader with much-needed context. Elizabeth declines, at any of the venues at which she has been invited to speak, to give a conventional address. She seems determined to nonplus her audiences: she denies the rationale for writing, promotes less than popular causes, and supplies abrupt endings that undermine her arguments.

Once the speeches turn toward philosophy, I find them difficult to follow - something that says more about this reader than about the writer, I am certain. On the more accessible subject of American dialect, however, I offer both a general and several specific criticisms. When Elizabeth visits a college in Waltham, Massachusetts, to judge from the speech of those around her, she might as easily be anywhere in the Commonwealth. Now, perhaps we can attribute this to the prevalence of speakers of British-influenced Eastern Acadamese - but perhaps not. The same is true of her visit to Williamstown, Pennsylvania, particularly as applied to these four snippets of dialogue from the California writer and lecturer Susan Moebius:

'I'd like to get on to [move on to] The House on Eccles Street, which is the book you are best known for in this country...'

'And then I read your book and realised that Molly didn't have to be limited in the way Joyce had made her to be [made her]...'

She ruffles his hair. 'Don't be cross [angry],' she says.

From her purse she takes something and lays it on the table: his watch. 'It is three hours out [off],' she says.
'Not three,' he says. 'Fifteen. Canberra time.'

It isn't that an American speaker could not say these things, but it is very unlikely that she would. It is true that no specific mention is made of Susan's nationality, but the reader is allowed to assume she is American - and it would be duplicitous of the author to have her be otherwise without specifically naming it.

To end, I will appropriate one of the novel's own constructs, as portrayed in this exchange between Elizabeth's son John and Susan Moebius:

'But my mother has been a man,' he persists. 'She has also been a dog. She can think her way into other people, into other existences. ...'
'Perhaps. But your mother remains a woman all the same. Whatever she does, she does as a woman. She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man.'

Could Susan's comments on gender not apply equally well to dialect? One could say that Coetzee inhabits his American characters as a South African-born Australian does.

Two Friendly Persuasions and The Lincoln Train

2007-03-13T22:35:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I was at the Ann Arbor ReUse Center, waiting to pay for 75 cents' worth of stationery, including some charming postcards of Soviet-era Moscow with the city name stamped in gold Cyrillic script. The customers ahead of me were making complex arrangements to pick up furniture, so I passed the time with a lovely old cloth-bound book I found lying on the counter, The Friendly Persuasion, a 1940 novel by Jessamyn West, about a Quaker, Jess Birdwell, and his family, set in Indiana during the 1860s. I was particularly taken by the chapter, "The Battle of Finney's Ford," in which a small town is threatened by Confederate troops.

The next day, another collection of stories I had requested arrived at the library, Maureen F. McHugh's newest work, Mothers & Other Monsters. McHugh is the author of China Mountain Zhang (1992), one of my favorite works of science fiction – perhaps "speculative fiction" is the better label. It takes place in a future New York City, with the U.S. under China's sphere of influence, if not outright control. The protagonist, of half Latino and half Chinese ancestry, struggles with the contradictions of his ethnic heritages, his attempts to secure himself a better education, and the limitations placed on his life by the homophobia of the dominant culture.

It was not entirely a surprise, then, to find in Mothers & Other Monsters many stories in fanciful settings: the afterlife, as perceived from 1927 Kentucky; a love story in a futuristic Morocco; Quakers, during the Civil War…. Quakers, during the Civil War! Hadn't I just read….?

Such a meaningful coincidence demands that I diverge from my nit-picking, Blue Pencil ways, and simply write about these two works. There is, in any case, nothing to correct in the prose of either Maureen McHugh or Jessamyn West, both polished, masterful writers.

Jessamyn West's The Friendly Persuasion: "The Battle of Finney's Ford"

In "The Battle of Finney's Ford," invasion by the blood-thirsty Confederate leader, John Morgan, is imminent. The oldest Birdwell son, Joshua, feels he must defy his Quaker community's anti-war principles and join in the defense of the nearby town, Vernon. This conflict is presented in West's elegant, straightforward style, which nevertheless touches on the complexities of adolescent rebellion and parental authority, husband-wife power relations, gradations of fear and courage, and, as throughout the entire book, the question of moral conviction: what it means to live right and do the right thing.

Josh does indeed ride off to battle carrying his father' s rifle, but his war experience as we read of it is largely internal – no bullets singing past his ear, or mortally wounded men struggling by him to plant the flag. Instead, for Josh, and for us, it is a matter of waiting:

War, Josh thought, seemed a hard thing to come at. The dying and killing he had declared himself ready for at the breakfast table, and which he had imagined he would meet face to face as soon as he'd gotten out onto the road, seemed always to lurk round another corner. He had fortified himself for so many encounters with either or both that there were now almost no breastworks he could fling up, or armaments he could assemble. His supply of anticipation was about used up. War appeared to consist not of the dramatic and immediate sacrifice, either of his body in dying, or his spirit in killing, as he had foreseen it at the breakfast table, but of an infinite series of waitings and postponements.

We are poised for the battle to start, to discover whether Josh is brave enough to fight. West does not give us this easy satisfaction, the expected main course of a big, bloody steak; instead, she leads us quietly in a different direction, a series of side dishes, other considerations. Nothing is black and white; nor, refreshlingly, is it unreservedly grim:

Jess, from his place at the head of the table, looked down toward his eldest son. He bent upon him a face of so much love and regard – and good humor, too, as if behind this talk of war there were still a few reasons to laugh [...]

I won't give away the ending, but the following dialog between Josh and his younger brother Labe presents both a central theme of the chapter as well as the theme of self-knowledge that runs through the book:

"Thee wasn't fighting, was thee?" [Josh asked]
"Well, I was a little," Labe admitted.
"In the Guard?" Josh asked.
"No," Labe said, "just kind of privately."
"Why?"
"Well," said Labe, "when I's hunting thee a man sung a song."
"I wouldn't fight anybody about any song, " Josh said.
Labe didn't say anything.
"I purely hate fighting," Josh said. "Don't thee, Labe?"
"Not so much," Labe answered.
"I hate it," Josh said. "That's why I got to."
"And I got not to," Labe said, "because I like it."

Remarkably, West wrote this during World War II. Fast forward to our years of the Axis of Evil and of one nation building nuclear weapons in order to deter other nations from building them. West's outlook remains a drink of water in a dry place.

The Movie: William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion

In 1956, William Wyler, director of Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver and later Ben-Hur and many others, directed Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire in an adaptation of West's novel. West acted as a script writer and technical adviser and later wrote about these experiences in To See the Dream. As soon as I realized the film existed I hurried to find a copy on DVD at my outstanding public library.

It's a nice enough movie, I suppose, but having read the original novel, I couldn't help feeling that Indiana and its Quakers had been Hollywood-ized. (It was, in fact, shot in California on a studio set.) Gary Cooper makes a wonderful, quirky Jess, if a little tall for his time – how many six-footers were there in 1860? Dorothy MacGuire does not correspond to West's physical description of Jess's wife, Eliza, "a little, black-haired glossy woman," but acquits herself quite well in the role. However, the young Anthony Perkins as Josh is simply dreadful, all intense, brooding gazes with sweat beading on his forehead. He seems to have wandered in from the set of some Western or perhaps Gone With the Wind.

The portion of the film that draws its material from "Finney's Ford" is, predictably, rife with Hollywood clichés. There is – of course – a cavalry charge. A fallen hero clutches a handkerchief to his (decorously) bleeding breast and dies heroically. None of this is particularly objectionable – or would be, if this were a film about war rather than about peace-loving Quakers. However, the depiction of the community seems all wrong. A few "thees" and "thous" and – presto! Quakers. The Birdwell family is portrayed as loveable and normal, but all others in the Meeting are shown as oddballs and eccentrics, whether harmful or not; they have bizarre facial hair and wild expressions, and take actions that are out of character with their community. My greatest beef is with an added scene in the film in which Eliza attacks a soldier with a broom when he threatens to capture her pet goose for dinner. The scene betrays the spirit of an earnest debate held in the book on exactly that topic: whether it is permissible to withhold a pet bird from rampaging soliders. The film appropriates that debate and turns it into slapstick. A book's intention is bound to be stood on its head when it is made into a movie, but I wish West's characters had retained their sense of humor and their dignity.

Maureen F. McHugh's Mothers & Other Monsters: "The Lincoln Train"

My description of "The Lincoln Train," one of many challenging and thought-provoking stories in McHugh's new collection, must be short, so that I do not deprive other readers of the story's surprises, which were a key part for me of the experience of reading it.

The setting is Mississippi, sometime during the Civil War. Seventeen-year-old Clara Corbett and her mother are two members of a crowd on a train platform, all in the process of being forcibly relocated by Northern soldiers to the Oklahoma territories. Their crime is having been "recalcitrant."

What this means, I will leave you to discover, but I will disclose how intensely I was struck by similarities with Jessamyn West's story. Once again, morality is presented in the context of the family, in this case Clara and her mother and the others who compose their household. The questions of morality, again, are far from simple: Does fighting one evil necessitate admitting another? What should a good person's reaction be when doing the right thing harms innocent people, perhaps even the ones intended to be helped by that right thing? What does it mean to be peaceful in time of war or great moral outrage?

As you close the book, these questions and all their implications dig themselves deeply into your mind. Read this story as an anecdote to any day's headlines in the mainstream media.

It seems right to end with this passage from "The Battle of Finney's Ford":

Josh reached for his gun. Waves of something, he didn't know what, were hitting his chest. It's like riding through the woods and being hit by branches that leave thee in the saddle, but so belabored thy chest aches, he thought. Other waves, or perhaps the same ones, pounded against his ears, broke in deafening crashes as if he were deep under water, buffeted by currents that could break bones, could rip a man out of his flesh and let him run, liquid, away. Then, in the midst of the pain and crashing, Josh thought, It's thy heart beating. Nothing but thy heart.

Who's who

2007-01-02T00:05:00.000-05:00

Who's Who in Hell, by Robert Chalmers, is another Anglo-American portrayal of the relationship between two lovers as well as the relationship between their two cultures and languages. Daniel Linnell, a counselor at a London psychotherapy practice, meets and instantly falls for Laura Jardine, a native of Bedford, Kansas who has been living in England for fifteen years. The novel is written from Daniel's point of view, and it is against the background of his transition from counselor to bartender to obituary writer (hence the novel's title) that we become acquainted with Laura (flippant), her family (disturbed), her apartment ('unattended to'), her hobbies (skydiving and dog photography), and her linguistic talents (prodigious, yet - as I will discuss - dubious).

As a long-term expatriate, Laura is often positioned as the interpreter between two worlds. Because her residence in England dates to her teenage years, we can easily imagine her assuming the speech and manners of her peers rather than those of her Midwestern family – at least sufficiently well to explain one to the other. In the following exchange, Laura is interpreting British English to her fellow American, Jessica:

[…] Daniel found Laura in the office with Jessica Lee, talking to Rachel about [Rachel's] son, Jordan. "And you know he's three,' Rachel said. 'And he's started to ask for a dummy. He's never shown any interest in a dummy before.'
Jessica looked puzzled. 'A dummy?' she asked. She turned to Daniel. 'What's a child want with a dummy?'
'It's a pacifier,' Laura explained.

While Laura's part in this conversation is perfectly plausible, Jessica's use of the phrase 'What's a child want with a dummy?' seems contrived – and inexplicable, given that the function of the passage is to show that Laura's command of British English is superior to Jessica's. Wouldn't Jessica have said, more simply, "What's a dummy?"

The author seems to make the point that Laura both consciously and unconsciously plays with language, just as she plays with her lover's feelings, but I'm not sure he achieves the intended effect. In one instance, while feverish and delirious, Laura calls out the names of past boyfriends. Later she confesses to Daniel:

'I did it to make Robin pissed,' she said, her grasp of English phrasal verbs deserting her for once.

The distinction Laura is trying to draw is that an American, when annoyed, is pissed, whereas a Briton is pissed off. I'm willing – perhaps – to accept that distinction, but I can't quite swallow the phrasing. Wouldn't an American have said, 'I did it to piss off Robin'? Again, since the point of this passage is to illustrate Laura's role of standing between two cultures, why chose a sentence that works in neither dialect; Laura makes a mistake, as the narrator clearly intends - but she makes the wrong mistake.

To observe the successful effect, on the other hand, see the following passage:

'He's mean,' she said. 'He's mean with money. He's mean to my brother. And he's mean…[t]o me.'

In this clever bit of wordplay, Laura demonstrates her familiarity with the British idiom of 'meaness' denoting stinginess and the American sense denoting cruelty.

On the whole, while I am interested in the character that Chalmers wants to portray, and agree that Laura's ease in two languages - and her accompanying failure to belong properly anywhere - is admirably suited to the novel's theme, more often than not, the effect simply doesn't come off.

In any case, enough of Laura's American roots remain to render her both exotic and irresistible to Daniel:

She talked easily about herself. It was a quality he'd found to be rare in English people who weren't very drunk or suicidal, though on a normal day at Resolve [therapy practice] Daniel listened to plenty of both. He wondered if that meant she was flirting, and decided it didn't. It was the American in her. Quite why Americans ever needed to drink was a mystery to him, since most of the ones he had met behaved as if they'd just had three large brandy and ports.

There are plenty of examples of Laura speaking American and going awry, but given the cross-cultural character Chalmers is aiming for, they don't prove anything. I include these five examples merely for my own amusement:

They hardly spoke [said] a word in the car on the way back. The next day it was my dad's birthday.... We went out in the morning and we bought this cream linen dress [cream-colored linen dress or maybe off-white linen dress] with flowers woven into it. […] And then that evening I was sat round [I was sitting around] that table, with my hair up, with my grandparents and my brother Paul and my Aunt Laura from Priceville Alabama and everything and he pulled the wishbone with my mother, and I watched her let him win.

'It just stops the place looking…' She hesitated. 'I don't know…piss elegant.' [Is there an American equivalent for this expression?]

'Anyway, Paul carried [kept] on going up the silo [to the top of the silo] for a couple of weeks.'

'He's still in bed with a hangover. We're almost getting on [along].'

'The other day he was round [over] at mom's house and I saw him touch a radiator, to earth [ground] himself.'

We can, it is true, dismiss Laura's Anglicisms as the consequence of the half of her life lived in England. However, the fact that some Americans who have never set foot out of Kansas make similar mistakes casts doubt upon the author's intentions and performance.

Janice Hammond, the librarian:

The following day, after much negotiation, Hammond agreed to let him have the laptop on, so he could read his notes from its screen, on condition that he didn’t type, and he switched the machine on outside, before he came in. 'Bleeps,' she said – Daniel glanced round the deserted room and stifled an impulse to join in with her, - 'disturb other readers.' [beeps]

Laura's friend Kate:

'I threw away all my size tens a couple of months ago,' Kate said, 'to make me slim back into the eights.' [diet or reduce]

I would hazard a guess that the author on some level is aware of his challenges in writing American dialect. In the course of a fascinating conversation Daniel holds with a priest, John Oakes, on – among other matters – whether the singer Robert Johnson 'sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his gift', Oakes uses a number of English expressions, such as 'you should do' and 'he was called Bill Phythian.' Suddenly, just as the exchange ends, Oakes reveals himself to be Australian. There is no additional support or necessity in the text for an Australian priest turning up in a bar in Bedford, Kansas, so I can only assume that the author is providing himself with a form of linguistic insurance: his character can safely refer to Horlicks (the English version of Ovaltine) without irritating discerning readers.

In spite of the contents of this post, I find that if Who's Who in Hell has a major weakness, it is not its treatment of speech and dialect. Rather, in the final third of the novel, as the pace altered abruptly and the tone darkened dramatically, I felt that I was suddenly reading a very different book than I had bargained for; a comedy became a tragedy. This is not necessarily a failing, I suppose, but it was certainly a surprise.

Failing or not, the novel's treatment of Daniel and Laura's romance and – even more entertaining – the products of Daniel's pen in his profession of obituary writer are worth the whole book. I close with this quote from Daniel's obituary of the fictional jazz musician Elliot King:

King wrote one song, in the early seventies, called 'Life is Better on Cocaine', 'a philosophy,' [Daniel] Linnell wrote, 'that his own CV did little to confirm. The violent lack of control in his personal life,' he went on, 'was a disturbing but perhaps necessary corollary to his brilliant career as an improviser, in which he developed a reckless unpredictability that endeared him to two generations on enthusiasts.'

'One of the great jazz songwriters of his age,' he wrote in his final paragraph, 'Elliot King was a man who believed the pen was mightier than the sword, but didn't always have a pen to hand.'

Voilà! A viola!

2006-11-11T23:35:00.000-05:00

I have always been curious about the mechanics of proofreading and copy editing at big publishing houses, particularly as applied to text in foreign languages. For instance, whenever voilà is printed as viola, I wonder what spellchecker - automated or human - is making the substitution.

Audrey Niffenegger's novel The Time Traveler's Wife provided several instances of foreign language misprints - and, to be fair, many correctly reproduced words and entire passages.

The time traveler, Henry deTamble, explains he is compelled, against his wishes, to travel to the past over and over to observe his mother's fatal car crash:

He shrugs. "It's like with Mom. The accident. Immer weider." Always again, always the same." [wieder]

This "i before e" confusion is based in English, of course, since in German "ie" is always prounced ee, while "ei" is always pronounced ay.

A small error of capitalization occurs in the following passage:

[Henry:] I think about my mother singing lieder after lunch on a summer afternoon... [Lieder]

German nouns are capitalized even when used in English sentences - at least, so I believe. After several days of searching through various online MLA stylesheets, I still cannot back up my assertion. I did find the following indirect evidence in Dr. Abel Scribe's MLA Style Crib Sheet; strictly speaking, it addresses the capitalization of titles, but see my italics inside the quote:

As a rule, titles in French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Latin are more conventionally rendered in sentence caps (capitalize just the first word, all proper nouns [according to the convention of the language], and the first word after a colon).

We'll just assume that what holds for titles holds for the text.

Henry leaves out a word in this beautiful passage from one of Rilke's Duino Elegies:

Überzähliges Dasein/entspring mir [im] Herzen. [...] Superabundant being/wells up in my heart.

In a hospital scene near the end of the book, Henry's wife Clare finds herself constructing sentences in French as she sits by her injured husband:

Oui, c'est une coupure profunde. [profonde] ("Yes, it's a deep cut.")

My dictionary, a 1960 Larousse Dictionnaire Moderne Français-Anglais, gives only profonde, not profunde.

Interestingly, in this account of Henry's well-practiced burglary technique, voilà is printed correctly, complete with accent mark:

First I open the insignificant combination lock that secures the security grate, slide the grate back, pick the Yale lock with the inside of an old pen and a safety pin found earlier on Belmont Avenue, and use a piece of aluminum between the double doors to lift the inside bolt. Voilà. Altogether, it takes about three minutes. Gomez regards me with almost religious awe.

However, a circumflex is omitted when Clare's high school French teacher addresses her:

"Tell me at lunch," Ruth calls as I turn and walk into Madame Simone's room.
"Ah, Mademoiselle Abshire, asseyez-vous, s'il vous plait." [plâit]

I would not normallly quibble about a diacritical mark, but why include one and skip the other?

We have just waded through errors so small as to seem ridiculous, which some critics would dismiss as "just orthography."

or·thog·ra·phy
The art or study of correct spelling according to established usage.
The aspect of language study concerned with letters and their sequences in words.
A method of representing a language or the sounds of language by written symbols; spelling.
(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.)

Orthography may be extraneous in a serious study of spoken language, but I believe that a published work owes its readers accuracy in the printed text. Before I get too cocky, however, let me admit that I was ready to pounce on the phrase at the end of the following passage, believing it to be a misprint of coup d'état:

[Henry:] She makes her standard response to my standard opening move, Queen's Pawn to Q4. We play out the next ten moves fairly rapidly, with only moderate bloodshed, and then Clare sits for a while, pondering the board. She is always experimenting, always attempting the coup d'éclat.

A coup d'éclat, to combine definitions from several sources, is "to perform a remarkable feat, in the expectation of being noticed." Now that I have this phrase at my disposal, I must try to work it into a conversation. There exist, perhaps, remarkable feats of editing; I must hope that I will perform one of them someday.

In addition to its dashes of French and German, The Time Traveler's Wife is also rich in the vocabulary of incunabula, punk music, and artisanal paper-making. How much we can learn from fiction! It also caused me to consider [WARNING! Mild spoiler ahead!] some of the indirect challenges of time-travelling - as if the act itself would not be sufficiently difficult. A traveler who visits his past from age 35 to drop in on his 6-year-old sweetheart-to-be might not have any knowledge of that meeting when he and his sweetheart meet initially in real time at ages 28 and 20, respectively. At age 28, Henry hasn't caught up to the knowledge he gained from his trip to the past at age 35.

It had never occurred to me that one might time travel back or forward in time to meet ... oneself. The Time Traveler's Wife is positively brilliant on exploring the ramifications of this quirk. My only suggestion, since Henry deTamble is a librarian, is that one of his selves be taken aside and kept busy with a few French and German reference works. Henry, your next mission: read this entry and surprise your author with corrections - before she's even written the mistakes. Or, for that matter, before she's written you!

September 11

2006-09-11T22:00:00.000-04:00

September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tommorows, an organization for which I have the utmost respect, has formed a coalition with other international organizations representing victims of terror. Following their conference entitled "Civilian Casualties, Civilian Solutions," the coalition issued the following statement:

We are a global network of organizations comprised of people who lost loved ones to, or were directly affected by, war, nuclear weapons, terrorism, genocide, organized crime, and political violence. We work together to break the cycles of violence and revenge, and are committed to honoring the memories of the victims and to the dignity of the survivors.

Using our collective experience and skills, we are dedicated to identifying and addressing the root causes of violence, and to promoting non-violence as the most effective strategy for resolving conflict.

We pledge to support and amplify each other’s efforts across diverse communities, recognizing that we derive our strength from our common experience of loss and our common hope for a world free from violence.

To learn of a dedicated commitment to non-violence by those very people from whom we might expect the strongest inclination to violent revenge is to be reassured - and how we need this reassurance! - of the strength and goodness of human beings.

On a more prosaic note, I wouldn't be Blue Pencil if I didn't find fault somewhere. The use of comprised of in place of comprising or comprises is becoming more and more common; it is even listed in most dictionary entries. I admit that the traditional usage has come to sound strange to our ears:

We are a global network of organizations comprising people who lost love ones [...]

My preference is to take the easy way out and instead use composed of, consisting of, including, or containing.

To learn more about September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, visit their website, or read their book, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows: Turning Tragedy into Hope for a Better World.

Trying to speak

2006-09-10T23:40:00.000-04:00

My post on Kingdom of Lies declared that it was possible to write about the Anglo-American speech difference with a fresh perspective and humor. One charming example is Marjorie Leet Ford's Do Try to Speak as We Do: The Diary of an American Au Pair. It follows Melissa, a young American who takes an au pair position in England with member of parliament Angus Haig-Ereildoun and his family.

Language and culture, yours and mine

Not only is Melissa a brash Yankee struggling to learn an unexpectedly different dialect (not to mention the ins and outs of caring for three children), but her upbringing has not prepared her for the contradictions in the lives of upper-class yet impoverished Britons: living in large, priceless old houses with no furniture, and having five people use the same bathwater, for example. The title is taken from Mrs. H-E's request to Melissa to speak British dialect so that three-year-old Claire, who is hard of hearing, can learn to speak "correctly." Mrs. H-E is the source of most of Melissa's difficulties:

[Mrs. H-E:] "Melisss-sssa! You didn't make up the cot!" Her face was as red as the bullfighter's blanket.
Explosions of fear went off inside me. I heard my voice quiver as I whispered, with all honesty, "Yes I did. I made up the cot."
"You did not!"
"But – I did…"
"You did not!"
She marched me down the hall. There, in the children's room, were the three beds, all made up with sheets, blankets and, pillowcases. One was the small bed, the kind Claire sleeps in in London.
"You did not make up the cot!"
I hardly had any voice, but I pointed to the small bed and eked out the words, "Yes I did."
She pointed to the crib and said, "You did not!"
"Oh!" I said. "The crib?"
She glared at me.
"I'm sorry," I said. "We call that a crib. This is a cot." I pointed to the undersized bed.

This exchange seems entirely plausible to me; the English uses of crib and cot wouldn't necessarily be known to the average American speaker, and Melissa's reaction to Mrs. H-E's fury is painfully realistic.

More such misunderstandings abound. The combination of well-meaning Melissa, weary and impatient Mrs. H-E, and the gulf between two cultures introduces some highly amusing moments. Wouldn't the following passage work well in a film?

By a grove of leafless hardwoods, she [Mrs. H-E] swerved the car to a stop. "I'm sorry!" she exploded, turning to the backseat. "I've endured it thus far, you being an American. But I can't take it any more."
My heart stopped. What had I, or my country, done?
"We must go to the loo!" she said. "I'm sorry. But that is a fact. We must urinate."
I had felt under pressure to urinate myself. What did this have to do with America? I'd been wondering when we'd ever get to a gas station. Having started to learn the language, I said, "When will we get to the next petrol station?"
"Petrol station!" She shot the words. "I'm talking about the need to urinate!"
I closed in my shoulders, all compressed and petrified.
"You Americans are such prudes, you can't go by the side of the road. What on earth do you do?"
I was thinking, we go to a gas station, but apparently these petrol stations didn't have toilets, so I told her what we'd do instead: "We go in the woods."
She heaved a great sigh and restarted the station wagon to steer it into a thicker clump of hardwoods. "You're lucky this isn't France," she snapped. "You might die of shame! They just wee-wee right on the edge of the road."

Of course, Melissa adapts, and by the end of the book we see exchanges like this one:

Simon asked if I'd had any fan mail for the one [column] he helped me write. I said I hadn't had a chance yet to look at my post. He teased me: "One month ago you'd have called it your 'mail.' You'd better watch out. You're turning English." "I don't have an English accent though, do I?" I asked in fear. All of them laughed.

Beyond speech … writing!

But there is more to Do Try to Speak as We Do than Melissa's gradually picking up a few new words and learning how to blend in. The column mentioned above is a result of the lengthy letters Melissa writes home to console herself. After she sends an account of her weekly haute cuisine cooking class to the food editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, she is asked to write a column:

"Great letter. Mind if I print it? Send more. One per week if you can. Just write letters to me. Keep gossipy. Include recipes."

And so Melissa discovers her vocation, writing. The narration for the story is written in the present tense, but the reader is aware somehow of Melissa's hand skillfully recording these events after the fact. I found this interesting, because although it's not stated, it seems to me that a much older Melissa must be writing, looking back. Read this passage, and see if it sounds like something written by someone in her early twenties:

Mrs. von Teplitz I like. She has big teeth, like Princess Anne or Eleanor Roosevelt, and a thoroughbred's bone structure. She's almost as tall as Mr. Haig-Ereildoun, and all her angles jut out like the studs of an unfinished building: Her clothes drape in points over shoulders, hips, elbows, and knees. Tonight she wore a long skirt, hand knit from nubbly wheat-colored wool yarns and gold twine, with a matching knit camisole and long matching cardigan. Even I could tell she didn't get this at Peter Jones, the department store where Mots and Mrs. Haig-Ereildoun shop. This was one of a kind. She wore no bra, and the weave was so loose that I worried Mrs. von Teplitz's nipples, as well as her hipbones, would wear holes into the fabric.

There's a certain restrained watchfulness and humor that speaks to me of someone much older. It also occurs to me had this novel been set at the time it was published (2001), we might expect a mention or two of the Internet or, at the very least, cell (mobile) phones. Of course, had Melissa had an e-mail account, she might not have written long letters home on "heavenly blue airmail paper." Regardless of these speculations, the action of this story seems to me to take place at least twenty years ago, although no dates are given.

More than the (delicious) sum of its parts

I heartily recommend Do Try to Speak as We Do. Far from being the lightweight summer read it might at first appear to be, it is an incisive account of one young woman defining herself against two cultures. The Melissa-as-writer premise allows the narration about language to interweave delightfully with the actual dialog.

If that doesn't draw you in, the beautiful descriptions of scenery in London and Scotland will, as will the commentaries on newly-discovered food:

Kedgeree is the best. We make it with the delicious smoked herring Mr. Haig-Ereildoun brings home from Kinturriff. We flake the fish into a pot of rice, melt in a hunk of Aberdeenshire butter, and jumble in some hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters. If we have a lemon, we squeeze it over the dish. Kedgeree tastes like Scotland.

She [the cooking class assistant] dispenses slices [of foie gras] the size of fifty pence coins, plus a spoonful of sauce, and with each serving a grape or two, a chunk of porcini and some capers. Oh, those brown bits! Specks of buttery crust from the foie gras membrane blended with the sweetness of the Sauternes, with the tang of those grapes cooked in it. The juicy fresh porcini is even wilder next to the zip of baby capers. The foie gras itself is so creamy it gives the teeth barely any resistance. That richness with a texture must be where the word "toothsome" comes from.

I realize that I like Do Try to Speak as We Do because it is one of a favorite adolescent genre: the young woman abroad, meeting challenges on her own, discovering herself against the strangeness of a different culture – an overseas Bildungsroman, if you will. If you read German and have the good fortune to find a copy of Mein Jahr in England, by Margot Kreuter, you will find another gem of this kind. Do Try to Speak as We Do is also, of course, a member of another compelling genre: anyone who thrilled or groaned at the conflict between parents and babysitters in Emma McLaughlin's The Nanny Diaries, will love Do Try to Speak as We Do.

I'm my own grandpa

2006-09-08T13:35:00.000-04:00

Well, not quite. But it's a catchy title for my purposes; let me explain.

I was searching for the pronunciation of the last name of Hollywood film director Alexander Mackendrick, known for The Ladykillers (1955) and The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). I was skimming the page on Mackendrick (or MacKendrick, as it is variously written) on Answers.com, when the following sentence caught my eye:

At the age of six, MacKendrick’s father fell victim to the influenza epidemic plaguing the nation after the first world war.

It wasn't until I caught myself wondering how a six-year old could have already sired a child before the flu did him in, that I realized a dangling modifier was creating the confusion. What Answers.com obviously meant to write was:

When MacKendrick was six, his father fell victim to the influenza epidemic...

If I were in a Freudian mood, I would ask myself whether the beginning of the school year was raising fears in my mind about my six-year-old's reproductive capacity and inclinations, but I think that's overdoing it.

I'm still looking for the pronuncation of Mackendrick. I suspect the stress is on the second syllable, but immigrant names (his family emigrated from Scotland to the U.S. shortly before his birth in 1912) can be unpredictable. Any ideas, readers?

Locker room redux

2006-09-04T13:15:00.000-04:00

Someone at the gym studied up on apostrophes after I wrote my earlier post; these snazzy new signs recently appeared:

When I wrote about Strunk & White, I somehow confused myself into believing in Girls's and Boys's locker rooms. On re-reading The Elements of Style, I'm not quite sure where I got that idea. Girls' and Boys' are perfectly correct; as an anonymous commenter pointed out, I was simply wrong.

At any rate, until our culture embraces unisex locker rooms - remember the anti-ERA furor about unisex bathrooms in the 1980s? - I think this is as good as it gets.

Separated by a common language

2006-09-04T00:05:00.000-04:00

At the end of my last post, on Kingdom of Lies, I quoted George Bernard Shaw's famous aphorism:

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

At the time of writing, I did a quick Internet search to confirm the quote. How fortunate that I did, because I happened upon the wonderful blog, separated by a common language, which covers all manner of speech differences between American English, British English, and the occasional Canadian or South African equivalent. The writer, lynneguist, examines in detailed, well-researched fact some of the same topics that Blue Pencil addresses more cavalierly in fiction. Lynneguist's most recent post, purses and bags, would have been a welcome reference for my thoughts on David Lodge's American character, Stella:

Yeah, I was doing drugs in those days … Always carried a stash in my handbag {To me, this word evokes the Queen; purse or just bag sounds better.}

I can tell I'll be linking to separated by a common language regularly.

Speaking of other blogs, some time ago Kate at Four Obsessions noted these false Americanisms in David Mitchells's Black Swan Green: the use of "polystyrene" for "styrofoam" and "stone" for the "pit" of a cherry. She clears up a cooking discrepancy as well. Read more of Kate's posts and enjoy!

AnonyMom to the Rescue

2006-08-30T08:00:00.000-04:00

Not related to Blue Pencil's mission, but interesting in its own way, is the new blog AnonyMom to the Rescue. It provides an interesting perspective on the Middle East conflict: Israel and Palestine as bickering siblings. See how AnonyMom gets these kids to make nice with each other!

Mystery lactation

2006-08-17T15:45:00.000-04:00

Turning from issues of grammar and dialect for a moment, I'd like to take mystery writer Elizabeth George to task for her portrayal of breastfeeding. My penciled corrections in library books are straying from the replacement of me with I (or vice versa) and lay with laid (ditto) to the insertion of the occasional indignant no! or you must be joking! A blog entry seems preferable.

The BBC adaptations of George's crime novels were very compelling, so I thought I'd read one. For the Sake of Elena (1992) concerns the murder of a young Cambridge undergraduate. Inspector Thomas Lynley jumps at the chance to investigate the case, because his sweetheart, Lady Helen Clyde, is in Cambridge helping her sister, Penelope, recover from the birth of her third baby, now four weeks old.

Before Lynley arrives, we are treated to the following description of Penelope from Lady Helen's point of view:

The windows were closed against the nighttime fog and cold air, and an electric fire in addition to the radiator made the room claustrophobic. Between the closed windows sat her sister's king-size bed, and looking ashen-faced even in the soft light of the bedside table, Penelope lay holding the infant to her swollen breast. Even when Lady Helen said her name, she kept her head tilted back against the headboard, her eyes squeezed shut, her lips pressed into a scar line of pain. Her face was sheened with sweat which was forming rivulets that ran from her temples to her jaws, then dripped and formed new rivulets on her bare chest. As Lady Helen watched, a single inordinately heavy tear trickled down her sister's cheek. She didn't wipe it away. Nor did she open her eyes.

Not for the first time, Lady Helen felt the frustration of her own uselessness. She had seen the condition of her sister's breasts, with their cracked and bleeding nipples; she had heard her sister cry out as she expressed the milk. Yet she knew Penelope well enough to know that nothing she might say could make a difference to her once she was bent upon a course of action. She would breast-feed this baby until its sixth month, no matter the pain or the cost. Motherhood had become a fine point of honour, a position from which she would never retreat.

Will someone find that mother a lactation consultant?

This passage bothered me so much, I had to go away and think about it for a few days. Mommy wars are everywhere in the media these days; apparently, mothers are duking it out non-stop in defense of their breastfeeding or bottlefeeding ways. Not wishing to fan the flames of this particular fire, I offer this small clarification of position before I continue:

Breastmilk is the best food for almost every baby. Formula, while not ideal, is sometimes necessary. Being human means it is not always possible to do the best thing. Each mother has the right to consult experts (midwives, lactation experts, other mothers, etc.) and make her decision, without fearing that others will judge her. Society's role should be to make breastfeeding easy, accommodated, and normal, and to remove all unnecessary obstacles.

Now, why did the passage I quoted get me so steamed? Besides being melodramatic to the point of absurdity, it seems to indicate that Penelope's determination to breastfeed her baby is nothing but stubbornness, a childish unwillingness to face reality, as well as a pathological cry for attention. I read the passage – and subsequent lengthy descriptions of her unhappiness – quite differently. Penelope has post-partum depression, lacks the support of her husband (who keeps slamming out of the house), and, aside from Helen, is completely isolated within her community, in a way that I find quite puzzling for a third-time mother. Penelope needs medical help, a lactation consultant (on the double!), a heavy projectile to get her husband's attention, and the phone number of her local La Leche League group. Most of all, she deserves the support and admiration of her sister – not to mention the authorial voice, which shines right through Helen's description – that she is a mother working hard to feed her child in the best way possible.

Fist curled, the infant gave over sucking. Her chin was wet with a thin greenish film of mother's milk.

That does not sound like admiration to me.

Elizabeth George is American, but writes very convincing English novels, so surely she knows that medical help is available to Penelope – this isn't America, where you sometimes have to choose between a week's anti-depressants and a week's groceries. And a minimal amount of research on George's part would have revealed that cracked or bleeding nipples are most often the result of poor positioning of the baby on the breast, and can be remedied without the need to switch to formula.

We pick up our understanding of cultural norms in just this way: casually, indirectly, and, yes, through fiction. Admittedly, mystery fiction is traditionally quite conventional; its goal, after all, is to return society to the status quo. This is all the more reason for a mystery novel to show us that breastmilk is what babies drink - even imaginary babies.

I wish I could offer an example of a novel that portrays breastfeeding realistically. None come to mind, but I'll keep looking. On a very slightly related subject, keep an eye out for Kris Holloway's fascinating and moving account, Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali. Holloway will be in Ann Arbor in early November and will read at the Ann Arbor District Library on Thursday, November 9.

Small island, big continent

2006-08-06T23:30:00.000-04:00

Andrea Levy's novel, Small Island, concerns two islands, England and Jamaica. Gilbert Joseph, a Jamaican, enlists in the British Army during WWII. While in England, he encounters American servicemen stationed there. These meetings represent a very small portion of the novel; however, the passages I found needed some Americanizing.

[American officer:] 'What can I say? I just explained it to your CO. You see we had a coupla trucks up your way so we stuck the parts on. Save you the bother of picking them up. We checked them ourselves in the end. Who cares whose fault it is? I told your CO. We're allies. The parts in the right place is all that matters. It's all square. Parts should be there… today. If not today tomorrow. Wasted journey. There's nothing left to pick up. But the sergeant here tells me he's taking care of you. Yankee hospitality, eh?'

The contrast of "a coupla trucks" with "wasted journey" is quite noticeable, don't you think? For bother I would substitute hassle, but my dictionary tells me that word was first recorded in English in 1945, origin unknown; the date of the passage above is unclear, although we know it takes place before 1948. So instead, I suggest trouble. An alternative to 'We checked them ourselves in the end' might be 'We ended up checking them ourselves.' Wasted journey should be waste of a trip.

Later, Gilbert gives a lift to two African-American servicemen, Levi and Jon, headed for some R&R. They insist on calling him "Joe."

[Levi:] 'You want to come round to us.'

This idiom simply doesn't exist in standard American English – if there is such a thing – or in African-American English, as far as I know. The closest equivalent I can come up with is, You should've asked us.

[Gilbert:] 'Your Brenda and Peggy don't mind to travel so far?'

They [Levi and Jon] both laughed a little. 'Now, they could rest in Lincoln. Me and Jon ain't so come-lately to think they don't have no white boys dangling from their chain when we ain't there to escort them.'

The uncertainty here concerns the verbs rest, stay, and stop. For an American, rest means "repose," although other meanings survive in expressions such as "I rest my case." A Briton might also say stop, meaning "remain," but an American would surely use stay.

[Levi:] 'You been good company, Joe. Now we sure would like to show our appreciation for the ride but we don't want to offend you.'

[Gilbert:] 'I was going your way. No problem.'
'Now, you sure that is enough for you? Only you've been kind.'

Here's another expression limited to British English: the sentence beginning with only, where an American would say, it's just that....

In general, Levy does well with the rhythm of Jon and Levi's speech, but there are those few instances that mark the speakers as touched by an English heritage they couldn't possibly have.

The novel is full of wonderfully evocative Jamaican dialog; Levy is herself Jamaican and now lives in London. Robert MacNeill, of MacNeill-Lehrer fame, in his 1986 PBS series, The Story of English, covered Jamaica, complete with a proposal for bilingual street signs: standard English and Jamaican English. I don't find any evidence of these signs online, so perhaps they were never adopted, more's the pity. I seem to remember the "No Parking" sign as being particularly pithy when phrased in Jamaican English. Readers, find me a photo, if you can!

Shot buck on chaw stone*

2006-08-02T14:48:00.000-04:00

One of my interlibrary loan requests relating to Girl from the South arrived: A Dictionary of Bostonese and Charlestonese, by Frank B. Gilbreth. The author, who originally wrote under the pseudonym "Ashley Cooper," is famous now for writing Cheaper by the Dozen, but was also, I learned from the foreword, the vice-president and assistant publisher of the Charleston News and Courier, who published the dictionary in 1974 as a fundraiser for one of its charities.

The foreword begins:

Perfect English is spoken in only two parts of the country: Charleston, South Carolina, and Boston, Massachusetts. The rest of the country simply struggles along as best they can in their attempts to communicate.

Ironically, visitors to the Holy City of Charleston or Boston, the Center of Learning, complain of problems in understanding or being understood. So far [h]as the rest of the United States departed from the crystal clarity of the Mother Tongue!

As you've probably guessed, this is yet another book on accents. It is a dictionary only in the sense that terms are arranged alphabetically, with definitions that clarify their pronunciation:

BECKON: Meat from a pig, often eaten with a-igs for brake-fuss.
CANE CHEW: Aren't you able to, i.e., "Cane chew talk like a good Charlestonian?"
HARMONY: Cooked grits.
HOMINY: What number?
NEW SAND KOREA: Ashley Cooper's newspaper.

Although I find the text - well, the whole concept - a bit precious, I have to admire the printing. The foreward claims 100,000 copies were sold, so the book can't have been hand-printed on a letterpress or anything of that nature, but it gives that impression. I envision this book on a lace doily at a Charleston bed and breakfast, with a little card next to it listing the price in graceful calligraphy.

As far as my researches into Charleston speech go - onwards!

*Short book on Charleston

Girl from the South of ...?

2006-08-01T13:20:00.000-04:00

It's been a busy summer, with several part-time jobs in addition to my two little exuberant, mess-making, not-sleeping-enough, eating-all-the-time full-time jobs. However, all along I've been stacking up books resulting from catalog searches, personal recommendations, reviews, and my book group - all by British authors writing dialog for American characters.

Charleston, South Carolina

The contemporary writer Joanna Trollope, the distant descendant of Anthony Trollope, is the author of many novels, including The Rector's Wife, which was made into a charming 1994 BBC mini-series, starring one of my favorite character actors, Lindsay Duncan. In her 2002 novel, Girl from the South, Trollope's main character Gillon, twenty-something native of Charleston, South Carolina, travels to London seeking career opportunities and escape from her family; she returns home later with a suitor in tow. I was told by my own native informant that Charleston speech is distinct among Southern dialects, as a result of Colonial English influences as well as the fascinating African-American Gullah dialect. My researches indicated that white Charleston speech is indeed unique, but largely - as far as I could discover - in its accent and inflection, rather than vocabulary and usage. In Maciej Baranowski's chapter, "Doing the Charleston (South Carolina)," in American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast, the dialect is described in terms of vowel change – very interesting, but not useful in analyzing written dialog.

Forging ahead, in the Dictionary of American Regional English, I found two entries under Charleston:
bloodynoun – Monstrous frogs, named 'blood-an-'ounds', from the sounds they utter, called in loud, deep bass for 'blood and wounds.'

boomalally – a soldier marching to music. Formerly applied only to a cadet of the South Carolina Military Academy … Later applied to any soldier, esp. to one on parade marching to music. The name seems to be derived from the sound of the drum.

Again, intriguing, but not relevant, since neither of these terms appears in Girl from the South – author, take note of missed opportunity for imparting local color!

I'm awaiting two reference works by interlibrary loan: A Social Dialect Survey of Charleston, South Carolina, by Raymond O'Cain and A Dictionary of Bostonese and Charlestonese, by Frank B. Gilbreth.

All that leaves me where I started: with my own impressions. Gillon is yet another American character who, most improbably, has rows and goes round to people's houses. Those obvious gaffes aside, I found that Trollope's errors for the most part fell into two categories: clear-cut Anglicisms and attempted Americanisms that fell flat.

Anglicisms

The following selections are spoken by Gillon and her family, every one a Charlestonian.

Martha: 'But as you're my daughter, I can't seem to do that.' (Americans say since.)

Gillon: 'I…well, I shan't be here, in November.' (Won't.)

Gillon: 'What time is it?' She looked at her wrist. 'Gone three.' (After three.)

Gillon: 'We kids always knew about it because my father was so keen.' (Enthusiastic or interested.)

'You were expected for six-thirty,' Boone said. (Expected at)

Gillon: 'I didn't invite you here to come take my family over.' (To come take over my family)

Ashley: 'You don't want to pay any attention to Gillon.' (Don't pay any attention to Gillon or Forget Gillon.)

Martha: 'We could go to the refectory – ' (American universities have cafeterias or faculty clubs or dining halls – or these days, food courts – unless they are religious institutions.)

Gillon: 'I'm not too crazy on what I think you might discover – ' (Crazy about)

'I was in disgrace,' Sarah said. 'I'd got to make my way back into society.' (I had to)

She said sotto voce, 'Black, dear, is for funerals.' 'I don't suit pink, Grandmama.' (I'd never heard this idiom, but a quick search on the net found young people from Wales, Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand and Singapore, talking about their clothes using this phrase. Americans would say Pink doesn't suit me.)

Gillon's sister Ashley is a new mother, facing the usual challenges:

She[the baby] wants feeding all the time.' This is either British or a variant of Pittsburgh-speak 'wants fed.' The typical American says wants to be fed or wants to eat or wants to nurse. I am hot on the trail on an article on this subject, but it's taking a while to get access.

'Maybe if I'd fed her myself, maybe if I'd persevered –' (Not an American idiom; we would say nursed her, breastfed her, or even more likely, been able to nurse, been able to breastfeed.)

The baby latched fiercely onto the teat, her feet rigid with the importance of the moment. (In America, cows have teats; women and baby bottles have nipples.)

Attempted Americanisms

The following expressions are off just enough to make American readers stop and scratch their heads in puzzlement.

'Butt out!' Gillon had yelled, ducking her face away from his mouth. 'Get away from me!'

This is not the expression I would use against unwelcome advances. At the very least, it should be butt off. Perhaps Trollope means cut it out! If I were writing this character, I would stick to the simpler – and cross-cultural – stop it!

Cooper stooped toward the portable icebox at his feet. 'Atta boy!' he called, and lobbed Henry another beer.

Trollope clearly intends Cooper to be getting beer from a cooler. Atta boy! is an American expression, but it is used when acknowledging some accomplishment, for example, had Henry just downed the beer in one gulp. I think Trollope is looking for a phrase that means pay attention! here you go!, perhaps heads up!

'What are you drinking?' 'Diet Coca-Cola – '

In an espionage movie, this would be the scene in which the foreign spy is uncovered and executed. Any American, especially one from the South, heartland of the world's biggest soft drink empire, would call the drink by its correct name, Diet Coke.

She [Martha] went to the icebox to get the pack of coffee.

Fridge, and package or bag or can or jar. I have known older Americans – of the generation born in the early 20th century – to use 'icebox' both for refrigerator and its antecedent, which truly was an icebox, so I looked up the word in the Dictionary of American Regional English. Published in 1985, DARE lists 'icebox' as a synonym for refrigerator, but only in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Florida and Iowa. Martha, Gillon's mother, is much too young to have known a true icebox, and not a resident of any of the states listed. Gong!

Ashley: 'She was so great at the birth. I'm not sure I wouldn't have gone stir crazy at the birth, without Mama.'

'Stir crazy' means you've got cabin fever – you're desperate to get outside, get moving. I think it's more likely that Ashley means just plain crazy, or if she wants to be emphatic, stark raving mad; it's even more likely that she would have said, 'I'm not sure I wouldn't have lost it completely at the birth, without Mama.'

In neither category…

Gillon's father, Boone, in an argument with his wife, Martha, presented me with one of the novel's most perplexing vocabulary issues.

'Have I just relapsed so far back into being a regular, unreconstructed ole Southern guy such as you wouldn't give the time of day to, that I occupy about as much space in your consciousness as the goddamn cat does?'

When I first read this, I wrote: 'Unreconstructed' is a word out of English socialist politics and absolutely unknown to Americans. Boone might have said good old Southern boy or good old boy.

Then I consulted The Dixie Dictionary, which defines 'unreconstructed' as, 'said of Southerners who wouldn't reconcile the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War.' So I was wrong, and the word is known in the South. However, I don't think it means what Trollope wants it to mean in Boone's mouth, namely that from a gender equality point of view, he is a Neanderthal – pace anthropologists! Neither he nor Martha seems to care much about the Civil War, at least not in this conversation; they're discussing gender issues in their marriage.

The south of where?

The speech of Joanna Trollope's Southern characters, especially Gillon's, undermines the veracity of the story. All her meticulous efforts at portraying Charleston flora, fauna, manners and mores are in vain if her protagonist sounds like she's just stepped out of her flat in Croydon.

The challenge of writing in a dialect not your own is formidable. How can you know what sounds right, what is in character?

However, I must confess that the last word on this subject is far from in. While re-reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on vacation, I was surprised by a reference to a row (argument), which suggests that one British idiom, at least, was found in the South 150 years ago. What this means, I can't say, but it did have the effect of making me a little more cautious about my pronouncements. More on this topic as various reference sources – and your comments – trickle in.

Spelling bee

2006-05-13T21:40:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to Blue Pencil. Where have I been? Editing my garden. The annual infestation of garlic mustard has kept me away from the keyboard and knee-high in the Evil Weed. A quick web search shows many creative recipes for garlic mustard; how fortunate that I have a supply that keeps renewing itself.

Today I watched a spelling bee at the Ann Arbor (MI) Book Festival. I was humbled by the number of words I missed, which included quite a few I had never heard of.

Words I know and should have been able to spell:

googol - equivalent to ten raised to the power of a hundred (10¹⁰⁰). ORIGIN 1940s: said to have been coined by the nine-year-old nephew of E. Kasner (1878–1955), American mathematician, at Kasner's request.
edifices - a building, esp. a large, imposing one.
abecedarius - a poem having lines beginning with letters of the alphabet in regular order.
somnambulant - walking or tending to walk while asleep.
aeschylean - adj. of Aeschylus - Greek tragic dramatist whose plays were the first to include two actors in addition to the chorus. Only 7 of his 90 dramas survive, including the Oresteia trilogy (458).

Words unfamiliar to me:

soavemente - (Mus.) Sweetly.
lolloped (lollop)- move in an ungainly way in a series of clumsy paces or bounds : the bear lolloped along the path. ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: probably from loll, associated with trollop .
quagga - an extinct South African zebra that had a yellowish-brown coat with darker stripes, exterminated in 1883. • Equus quagga, family Equidae; recent studies have shown that it was probably a variety of the common zebra. ORIGIN Afrikaans, probably from Khoikhoi, imitative of its braying.
minnesinger - a German lyric poet and singer of the 12th–14th centuries who performed songs of courtly love. ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from German Minnesinger ‘love-singer.’
rinkafadda - an Irish dance resembling the Virginia reel.
accrescent - Increasing in size after flowering, as the calyx of the ground cherry.
bergschrund - (Phys. Geog.) The crevasse or series of crevasses, usually deep and often broad, frequently occurring near the head of a mountain glacier, about where the n['e]v['e] field joins the valley portion of the glacier.
unguligrade - Walking on hooves.

My smugness having been punctured, I also include this correction to an earlier post: David Lodge's first published novel was not Ginger, You're Barmy, as I reported, but The Picturegoers (1960). Thanks to interlibrary loan, I obtained a copy reprinted in 1993 - apparently it was out of print for some time - and thoroughly enjoyed it, all the more because there were no American characters whose speech I felt called upon to critique. Lovers of cinema history will treasure the chapter in which various characters in the novel see the classic film The Bicycle Thief and share their perceptions of it.

How to Read a Book

2006-03-31T20:45:00.000-05:00

Tutoring students in English language and composition and ESL lets me indulge in all sorts of blue pencil tendencies. One other bonus is having a reason to explore the mechanics of two activities that most of us do instinctively, however well or badly: reading and writing. A search of the library shelves in the 800 section, along with a question to the ever-helpful reference staff, rewarded me with a stack of how-to books. This week I'm reading How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren.

I came to How to Read a Book with one question about reading comprehension: how to teach someone to read for content, short of wading through long sections of a work together and summarizing every paragraph - the Forced March model of reading comprehension. As so rarely happens, this turned out to be the right question for the right book.

Adler was the original author of the first edition, published in 1940; it remained at the top of the national best-seller list for over a year, according to his preface to the 1972 edition. The book is a model of structure; its table of contents divides the material into four parts:

The Dimensions of Reading
The Third Level of Reading: Analytical Reading
Approaches to Different Kinds of Reading Matter
The Ultimate Goals of Reading

The parts are further subdivided into chapters, complete with subheadings, all of which is listed in the table of contents.

I learned the distinction between fiction and non-fiction works, or, as Adler puts it, between expository and imaginative works: Expository books try to convey knowledge – knowledge about experiences that the reader has had or could have. Imaginative books try to communicate an experience itself – one that the reader can have or share only by reading – and if they succeed they give the reader something to be enjoyed. My particular interest in this case was non-fiction reading, which was easy to locate in Part 2. I include here the outline I put together for a student:

Chapter 6.  Pigeonholing a Book.  Know what kind of book you are
reading; learn this as early as possible, preferably before you
begin to read.

I.   Consider not only fiction vs. non-fiction, but different
    kinds of expository books.  An expository book is one that
    conveys knowledge, consisting primarily of opinions, theories,
    hypotheses or speculations; some genres are history,
    philosophy, science and mathematics.
II.  Learn from the title, chapter headings, preface, cover blurbs, etc.
III. Distinguish between practical and theoretical books.  Practical
    books teach you how to do something; theoretical books show you
    how things should be.


Chapter 7.  X-Raying a Book.  Discover the skeleton of any book.

I.   State the unity of the whole book in a single sentence, or at most
    a few sentences. This includes discovering the book’s theme.
    Be guided by chapter headings, but do not depend on them;
    authors' plans may change after the headings are written!  Be aware
    that any summary of a book is bound to be highly subjective.
II.  Set forth the major parts of the book and show how these are
    organized into a whole, by being ordered to one another and to the
    unity of the whole.  Create an outline to discern these parts and
    relationships.  This may follow the structure of chapters and
    sections, but doesn’t necessarily.
III. Discover the author’s intentions.  What is the main question
    the book tries to answer?  What end does the work serve?

This seemed to me a reasonable and practical approach to understanding a book, combining guesses about the content before reading with careful scrutiny while reading and deliberation after reading. The idea of stating the unity (Chapter 7, I.) is similar to the practice of writing a rhetorical précis, which I found in another work - more on that in some later post. A great advantage to keeping any sort of methodical record of your reading material, of course, is that when it comes time to review - for a final exam, for instance - most of the job is already done.

Other parts of How to Read a Book may be equally useful, although since it was so easy to locate what I needed, I didn't examine the entire book. I suspect that a deeper reading of the section on syntopical reading would prove particularly interesting; it describes how to research a topic when reading a large number of books is called for. The reader can also find specific instructions for reading history, science and mathematics, philosophy, and social science.

I am eager to try out Adler's method on some weighty tome. In the meantime, stay tuned for a British author who tries to make her characters speak Southern, and many more reading and writing guides.

Who Makes the Rules? Strunk, White & Kalman: The Elements of Style

2006-03-18T22:00:00.000-05:00

Mr. Bekkus frequently misused the word "hopefully."¹ He also made a point of saying locate instead of find, utilize instead of use², and never lost an opportunity to indicate or communicate³; and would slip in a "basically"⁴ when he felt unsure of his ground.
- from People in Glass Houses: Portraits from Organization Life, by Shirley Hazzard

Sometimes things just come together. I had been reveling in the new edition of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, when I picked up People in Glass Houses, a 1964 volume of linked stories by Shirley Hazzard. On the very first page, I identified two items^{1, 2} from S&W's "Words and Expressions Commonly Misused" list and contraventions of ³Rule 16 ("Use definite, specific, concrete language") and ⁴Rule 17 ("Omit needless words"). I think I'm channeling William Strunk.

Illustrations

Every editor, invited or not, needs reference works. Before last month, I had never read Elements from cover to cover, but Maira Kalman's delightful and whimsical watercolors in the latest edition piqued my interest. Kalman is the author of What Pete Ate From A-Z, read in my household at many a bedtime. In Elements she illustrates the examples with which Strunk and White elucidate their usage rules.

Kalman's artwork owes at least some of its charm to the drollness of those examples. I was sorry there was no illustration of one example to Rule 20 ("Keep related words together") in the incorrect version:

New York’s first commercial human-sperm bank opened Friday with semen samples from eighteen men frozen in a stainless steel tank.

S&W comment, "...the reader’s heart goes out to those eighteen poor fellows frozen in a steel tank." (The corrected version reads: "New York’s first commercial human-sperm bank opened Friday when semen samples were taken from eighteen men. The samples were then frozen and stored in a stainless steel tank.") However, an illustration was included for another Rule 2o example, "He noticed a large stain right in the center of the rug." (Incorrect: "He noticed a large stain in the rug that was right in the center.")

History and Format

For those unacquainted with the history of Elements, I offer this synopsis, gleaned from E.B. White's introduction to the 1979 edition, which is included in the 2005 version. In 1919 Professor William Strunk Jr. (that's right, no comma before the "Jr." - see Rule 3, "Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas") of Cornell University produced a slim volume of rules to write by. Its charm and effectiveness lie in its brevity; this virtue seems also to be its chief imperative: "Omit needless words!" White, a student of Strunk's, later revised the book for the 1957 edition, and again in 1972 and 1979. He updated examples and added a chapter, "An Aproach to Style," but in all other respects, the work retains its original shape and intention.

The volume consists of eleven elementary principles of usage, another eleven elementary principles of composition, a chapter on form, a list of commonly misused words and expressions (oh! balm to Blue Pencil's soul!), guidelines on style, and a list of difficult spelling words - including “siege,” which you will find in this blog's header.

Rules

In reading through Elements, I was most interested, of course, to find rules I questioned. It didn't take long: Rule 1, "Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's," includes the examples Charles's friend and Burns's poems. My instinct is to write Charles' friend and Burns' poems, so I hightailed it to The Chicago Manual of Style to double-check. According to Chicago:

The general rule for the possessive of nouns covers most proper nouns, including most names ending in sibilants...

They note an exception for Moses' leadership (S&W recommends the laws of Moses), but specifically mention Burns's poems. I bow to the majority opinion! (In light of this rule, I see that I was skating on dangerously thin ice in my previous post on the possessive S; how fortunate that I never committed myself to girls' locker room! Now I know it should be girls's locker room and consequently have a little more sympathy for the sign committee's dilemma.)

Several rules instructed me in matters I had often wondered about or felt unsure of. Rule 4, "Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause," explained one of my insecurities about commas, namely, why one sometimes finds a comma before and:

The early records of the city have disappeared, and the story of its first years can no longer be reconstructed.

The key is the independent clause where the relation between the two statements is not close or immediate. Conversely, if it is, use no comma:

He has had several years' experience and is thoroughly competent.

Another one that had me stumped was establishing the number of the verb when it is flanked by a singular noun on one side and a plural noun on the other. Rule 9 tells us, "A linking verb agrees with the number of its subject." The example:

What is wanted is a few more pairs of hands.

I found a number of useful tidbits in the chapter, "Words and Expressions Commonly Misused," among them:

Tortuous. Torturous. A winding road is tortuous, a painful ordeal is torturous.

I fear this posting is becoming both tortuous in its style and torturous in its length, so I'll close by heartily recommending a browse through the new edition of The Elements of Style.

Incidentally, in Shirley Hazzard's book, quoted at the beginning of this post, I believe she intends the Organization portrayed to be compared to the United Nations. In this case, don't use compared with! For clarification, see Elements, p. 68.

Rochester? Chicago? ... Pittsburgh?

2006-03-17T23:15:00.000-05:00

[William Labov] offered a hint. "If you're not sure what Chicagoan sounds like," he said, "watch old episodes of 'NYPD Blue' and wait for Detective Sipowicz to ask, 'What hee-appened?' Having Dennis Franz, a Chicago native, portray a New York City cop is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole."

The New York Times "Escapes" section ran a marvelous article today, exploring the dialects spoken between Rochester, NY and Chicago, with detours to Pittsburgh. (See "It's Not the Sights, It's the Sounds" - at least, until it expires.) The reporter, Tim Sultan, tracks the changes in certain words - cot and caught, for example - by listening in on conversations at diners throughout the Inland North and Midland dialect areas. Sultan's reference was the linguist William Labov, who together with Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg wrote The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. The atlas includes maps and audio samples - I'm itching to get my hands on it. In the meantime, the NYT web site (link above) contains a few audio clips spoken by Labov (over a telephone line, from the sound of it).

What does this have to do with Blue Pencil? Not much, but I treasure the reference (Can I get my public library to shell out $600+ for it? Or can I weasel my way into the depths of my local university library without a card? Stay tuned!) and found some favorite quotes. This one concerns researching the cot/caught difference:

"Nobody with the Chicago-Rochester dialect makes a fuss about it," Professor Labov said. "They aren't as self-conscious or aware of it. Give a New Yorker or a Southerner a piece of paper with a word on it and ask them to say it, they'll start sweating."

Blue Pencil's next frontier: spoken dialect critique. Road trip to Pittsburgh, anyone?

On (American) Beauty

2006-03-04T23:35:00.000-05:00

Jerome and Zora had been born in England, Levi in America. But all their various American accents seemed, to Howard in some way artificial - not quite the products of this house of his wife.
- From On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

Artificial is one way of putting it.

Englishman Howard Belsey is married to Kiki, a Floridian; their children, Jerome, Zora and Levi, have been brought up mainly in America and now live in a college town outside Boston. Although author Zadie Smith has her characters consciously using code switching with people of different ages, classes and race, she doesn't quite manage to make them sound American. Even allowing for the children's mixed upbringings, it's hard to reconcile their constant use of Anglicisms like these (I include the American equivalents):

English                       American
----------------------        --------------------------------
at the moment                 right now
what am I meant to do?        what am I supposed to do?
as it happens                 it just so happens; or, actually
invite him round              invite him over

Take, for example, twenty-year-old Jerome, working and living in England with his father's academic rival, Montague Kipps. We meet Jerome in a series of e-mails he writes to Howard, in which he sounds neither American nor twenty years old; nor does he seem to be writing within the style parameters of e-mail:

Hey, Dad - basically I'm just going to keep on keeping on with these mails {e-mails} - I'm no longer expecting {don't expect} you to reply {anymore}, but I'm still hoping you will, if that makes sense. Well, I'm really enjoying everything. I work in Monty Kipps's own office (did you know that he's actually Sir Monty??), which is in the Green Park area. It's me and a Cornish girl called Emily. She's cool. There're also three more yank {a yank doesn't refer to himself as a yank! American is better} interns downstairs (one from Boston!), so I feel pretty much at home. I'm a kind of an intern {either I'm kind of an intern or I'm a kind of intern} with the duties of a PA {administrative assistant or secretary or gofer} - organizing lunches, filing, talking to people on the phone, that sort of thing. Monty's work is much more than just the academic stuff: he's involved with the Race Commission, and he has {runs} Church charities in Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, etc. - he keeps me really busy. Because it's such a small set-up {setup}, I get to work closely with him - and of course I'm living with the family now, which is like being completely integrated into something new. Ah, the family. You didn't respond, so I'm imagining your reaction (not too hard to imagine!). The truth is, it was really just the most convenient option at the time. And they were totally kind to offer - I was being evicted from {unless legal eviction procedures were underway, an American would probably write kicked out of} the 'bedsit' place in Marylebone. The Kippses aren't under any obligation to me, but they asked and I accepted - gratefully.[...] I know you want me to tell you it's a nightmare, but I can't - I love {could a 20-year-old American man really write love in this context? I think he'd find the diction too embarrassingly feminine. Maybe really enjoy} living here. It's a different universe. The house is just wow {Jeepers! This sounds like a Brit's idea of what an American might say - in 1971. How about really amazing} - early Victorian, a 'terrace' - unassuming-looking outside but massive inside - but there's still a kind of humility that really appeals to me - almost everything white, and a lot of handmade things, and quilts and dark wood shelves and cornices and this four-storey {four-floor or four-flight} staircase - and in the whole place there's only one television {especially in e-mail, an American would write TV}, which is in the basement anyway, just so Monty can keep abreast {on top} of news stuff, and some of the things he does on the television [...].

The family are another thing again {is something else altogether} - they deserve more space and time than I have right now (I'm writing this on my lunch hour). But, in brief: one boy, Michael, nice, sporty. [...] There's also a very tall and beautiful daughter, Victoria, who I've seen only {only seen - an American of Jerome's age would misplace this modifier} in photos [...] [I]t's very cool to be able to pray without someone in your family coming into the room and (a) passing wind {passing gas or farting} (b) shouting (c) analysing {analyzing} the 'phoney {phony} metaphysics' of prayer (d) singing loudly (e) laughing.[...]

Now, listen to this next bit carefully: in the morning THE WHOLE KIPPS FAMILY have {has} breakfast together and a conversation TOGETHER and then get {gets} into {in} a car TOGETHER (are you taking notes?) - I know, I know - not easy to get your head around. I never met a family who wanted to spend so much time with each other.

I try to cut Jerome some slack; after all, his father is English, Jerome himself was born in England, and in the beginning of the novel lives there. Nevertheless, even beyond questions of culture, Jerome is simply not believable. I ask myself whether in the space of a paragraph, one person could write both of these phrases, one so adolescent and one so formal:

And they were totally kind to offer...

The Kippses aren't under any obligation to me, but they asked and I accepted - gratefully.

The most frequent deviations from American speech are issued by the characters who are most American, namely, Kiki and Carl (Zora's friend). The truth is that although the author tries to employ typical American speech patterns, Kiki and Carl, both African-American, sound remarkably similar to Howard, who is English and white.

Kiki: ...we got to keep an eye out for Jerome, though - he's about {around}.

Kiki: Me and some of the girls are taking her out for drinks {a drink}.

Carl: ...she lives in {on} my street...

(I also have my doubts about the dialog that is specifically in African American vernacular English. I'm no expert, but it doesn't sound quite right to me.)

Minor characters issue similarly confusing statements, including the department secretary Lydia - said to have a "salty Boston tongue" - and the delightfully slimy dean, Jack French.

Lydia: Remember that time she took {held} a class on a bench by the river?

Jack: And I redirect those questions. Have done {done so} for a while.

In addition, as a general rule, it would be more convincing to show Americans starting uncertain utterances with "Uh" rather than the English "Er."

On top of all this, the narrative voice is very English. However reasonable this may be, it is rather jarring considering all the action takes place not in Merry Olde, but New England and, furthermore, when many scenes are written from American characters' points of view:

The only time Levi had seen him laugh was when Levi asked Felix that first Saturday whether he had a job going.

On Beauty has problems beyond those of American dialect, but the dialect problems were so pervasive that I was unable to lose myself in the story. That's a pity, because dialect problems would be simple to correct.

...by me, naturally. You know where to find me, Ms. Smith!

Cheerio and so long.

How many fit in a locker room?

2006-02-25T22:12:00.000-05:00

My gym recently installed new locker room signs:

In the spirit of the Olympics, I award the gym management ten points for correct use of the possessive apostrophe. I deduct one point for inconsistency in number: apparently the adult female locker room is intended to be used by women (plural), but the youth female locker room is intended to be used by a girl (singular). Ditto men and boy.

The family locker room doesn't rate a possessive, but since family is a collective noun, it is worthy of an exception. I could argue that since this sign leads to a series of cabanas, it should read Family Locker Rooms, but I'm too busy enjoying the enclosed shower with its blissfully abundant hot water to care.

Circling back to the Olympic parallel, I note that according to the San Diego Union-Tribune, figure-skating judges '... give five separate "artistic" marks for such things as ... "physical, emotional and intellectual involvement" in a program.' My workout was completely devoid of intellectual involvement - unless you count my gleeful ruminations throughout that the new signage had just provided me with fodder for another post.

"I" is the new "me"

2006-02-13T22:05:00.000-05:00

In my last post I made a promise not to correct grammar in informal, everyday spoken language. Guess what I'm about to do?

My beef is with the errors that grammarians call 'hypercorrect': mistakes made by speakers trying very hard not to make grammatical mistakes. Nowhere does the American speaker overcompensate more than with the first person singular pronoun in the objective case.

Me. That's right, me, not I. Some examples:

Jane saw Ernest and me.
My father took me and my sister to school.
Harold gave the book to Abigail and me.

For some reason, these examples sound wrong to most American speakers; we ache to use I in place of me, even though in each example the pronoun is the object of either a verb or preposition. Why should this be? I have two theories:

Generations of parents rebuking their children for using me in place of I when the subjective pronoun is called for ("Me and Mikey are going fishing.") have made us think that me when used compoundedly in the objective case ("Show Mikey and me the fish." ) is incorrect.

There is a perception that I is more formal or just plain fancier than me. So just plain folks (those we might want to have a beer with, for example) will always use me, no matter what the case. For special occasions, though, when we want to gild our speech, we use I, no matter what the case.

We try to fudge by using myself. "My wife and myself invite you to a cocktail party." "Please give your papers to my assistant or myself before you leave." Our personal pronouns have a terrible case of nerves!

The solution? Since it is compound phrases that seem to cause us so much angst, just sound out the sentence with a single phrase. Most native speakers will find the correct sentence by instinct:

Jane saw ~~Ernest and~~ me.
My father took me ~~and my sister~~ to school.
Harold gave the book to ~~Abigail and~~ me.

~~My wife and~~ I invite you to a cocktail party.
~~Mikey and~~ I go fishing.

Because we're talking about everyday speech, it makes no sense to illustrate with a quote from literature. Instead, here's a snippet of dialog from an episode of The West Wing, courtesy of The West Wing Unofficial Transcript Archive. Laura Dern plays (somewhat unconvincingly, if you ask me) the U.S. poet laureate, Tabitha Fortis. She says:

There was a man in Banja Luka that I met. He took his son and I ... to go fishing in the Sava River.

I shudder to think that a poet, someone used to scrutinizing words and squeezing every last iota of meaning from them, could make this mistake. That's not to say we all have to use words exactly as sanctioned; only that if we use words in an unorthodox fashion, we should do so intentionally to achieve a desired effect.

While we're wandering through the Garden of Pronouns, may I say that what English truly needs is a second person plural. This would spare servers in fine restaurants the pain of addressing customers as "you guys" and would prevent the rest of us from appropriating folksy terms from other people's backgrounds ("y'all" or "yins"). Throw in a formal/informal pronoun like the French tu and vous to allow me to maintain first-name friendliness but businesslike distance with people who draw my blood or fix my car, and I'll be perfectly satisfied. For now.

Many thanks to Kate of Four Obsessions for her kind mentions - not one but two! - of Blue Pencil. Kate brings her critical pen to bear on reading, writing, cooking and knitting - all activities that need someone to haul back and bring them into line from time to time. Thanks, Kate!

Blue Pencil, conflicted

2006-01-29T21:19:00.000-05:00

I often experience a conflict between the prescriptive and the descriptive, as linguists put it. What, after all, does it matter whether our language follows an arbitrary set of conventions? To lie or to lay - surely it's all the same? And yet, shared conventions and meanings are what create a culture. On the other (third?) hand, most of us don't enjoy having our use of language corrected.

This situation finds an analogy in a common reaction to etiquette guides: "They're all about how to use the correct fork." Well, yes and no; however, there are times when it is critical to use the correct tool - at a job interview lunch, perhaps, or a lobster dinner. Of course, if you're sitting home alone with your salad, you can use whatever implement you like - even your fingers - and drip oily dressing on your newspaper with no repercussion except a problem getting your pen to work on the crossword puzzle.

Where am I going with this? The result I arrive at again and again is the inexact division between the spoken and the printed word. Spoken language, unless it is formal speech - a commencement address, for example - naturally tends towards the informal, the vernacular. You might say that the way any given group of people speak is the language. As long as native speakers can understand each other, their speech is by definition correct.

Written language, in contrast, is fixed, more formal. To my mind, those purporting to write Standard English should follow the conventions of that language, as laid down by Strunk & White, The Chicago Manual of Style, or some other authority. A novel that is written in dialect is, of course, exempt from this requirement as is any informal written language, such as instant messaging or a note left on someone's windshield. My reverence for the printed word does, however, require me to correct public signage ("Complementary [sic] bread served with entree.") and letters from my bank ("Free gift with new account!" - a gift is always free, or it's no gift!).

In closing, a declaration, lest my friends start crossing to the other side of the street when they see me: I believe it is rude to correct others' speech, unless those others are public figures, who really ought to set an example by their beautiful and clear use of language. (Of course, I also reserve the right to correct my children's speech until they are old enough to force me to stop.) One of the charming aspects of the American character is that we often find non-standard speech charming rather than imbecilic: the foreigner, the teenager, the vanguard of the ethnic subculture are admired and imitated, not scorned. The melting pot, the many-colored quilt - choose your metaphor, and glory in our differences.

To excuse all my other nosy intrusions, my only defense is my family motto: "Everyone's a critic."* In that spirit, I will confess to a terrible uneasiness with commas that no usage manual has ever resolved, and ask you, Dear Reader, to use your blue pencil too.

*Truth compels me to admit that the primary motto for my family should really be "No meal unaccounted for." I tried once to translate this into Latin so that I could put it on a family crest - still to be invented, but which would probably feature a crossed knife and fork. I was surprised to find in my dictionary no Latin word for meal, only words for breakfast, feast and so on. Are there any Latin scholars who can help?

To lie or to lay

2006-01-19T21:59:00.000-05:00

to lie (v. intr.)

present:   I lie, you lie, he lies.   He lies on the floor for his nap.
past:      I lay, you lay, he lay.    He lay on the floor for his nap.

to lay (v. tr.)

present:   I lay, you lay, he lays.   He lays the book on the floor.
past:      I laid, you laid, he laid. He laid the book on the table.

I first formally encountered these verbs in eighth grade English, with Mr. O. announcing that we would study to lie and to lay and there was to be no snickering. I was too much of an innocent to know what one might snicker about; now I am a little more worldly, but my urge is less to snicker than to moan despairingly.

Hardly a day passes without my reading an author who has confused the two verbs. Most recently, I found several instances of this confusion in Susan Minot's novel, Evening: "She lay clothes on beds..." and "He unfolded his napkin and lay it on his lap." Surely authors (or editors, perhaps?) could use the correct conjugations for verbs that are taught in middle school? (I begin to wonder if a different paradigm is operating: perhaps in the past tense I lay is believed to be more formal or more elegant than I laid, regardless of meaning.)

I turned to The American Heritage Dictionary and came across this usage note:

Lay ("to put, place, or prepare") and lie ("to recline or be situated") have been confused for centuries; evidence exists that lay has been used to mean "lie" since the 1300s.

Well, we can put an end to that right now! For those who would like a refresher from eighth grade, note that the verb lay is transitive; in other words, it takes an object - you can lay something. The fact that lay plus the object is usually followed by a prepositional phrase or adverb (on the table, down, etc.) does not change a thing. The verb lie, on the other hand, is intransitive - it does not take an object. You can no more lie something than you could, say, sleep something. Knowing this, anyone can memorize the above chart and be confident of knowing the lay of the land. Or is that the lie of the land? (Lay is correct.)

Getting back to snickering, a choice example of the lie/lay problem is from Mary Gordon's novel, Spending: A Utopian Divertimento. The main character, Monica, has met a man she likes. Enthusiastically. In one of many graphically enthusiastic scenes, Monica, speaking as the narrator, says, "He lay me on my back." Monica can get laid with my blessings - as long as she does it grammatically.

Several Deceptions - not deceptive enough!

2006-01-17T21:01:00.000-05:00

Jane Stevenson, in her collection of four novellas, Several Deceptions, situates her characters in England, Scotland, Holland, Italy and India with remarkable credibility. Dialogue and scenery are deftly formulated, with just enough foreign phrases and local color to intrigue and convince the reader.

Not in the case of the American, however. In "Crossing the Water", a delightful story of a heist gone wrong, Isabella, said to be "the worst sort of mix of New York and South America," is complaining to her dinner guests about her husband Stephen's cousins, Georgiana and Sock Holderness. Isabella “…remarked in the shrill, nasal tones of New York’s leaders of style and fashion":

‘Well, sweetie, what the hell are we meant {supposed} to do about them? Seriously, I mean, it’s like being related to the Munsters. The last time they were here, the guy lurched in with blood on his jacket, no kidding. I don’t imagine he’d killed {I'm sure he didn't kill} anyone, he’ll just have been {he probably was just} murdering some poor little bunny or something. Anyway, he stood in the corner like a Goddamned psychopath, drinking all {of} Steve’s whisky and growling. And who’s {who the hell is} he to look down at {on} us, anyway? He’s nothing but some kind of {a} hit-man with a fancy accent. And Georgie – well, she is Steve’s cousin, and a lovely little thing {girl}, and I don’t want to speak ill of the girl {bad-mouth her}, but the last time she was here, she drove me absolutely wild {crazy} – she drifted in like Little Orphan Annie with walked-over {worn-out} shoes and a string of pearls […] and she kind of winced and shut her eyes when anyone tried to be civil {nice to her}. He must have her absolutely {completely} brainwashed. It’s all gone on quite long enough. {Enough is enough.} There’s no way we can get through to the {this} guy Holderness: I don’t know if he’s rude or crazy, and I don’t want to {know}, but if we try and make contact with Georgie while he’s away, maybe she’ll get off her high horse a bit {little} and talk some sense to {into} him. It’s just plain ridiculous to be living five miles away, and not to visit {not visit}. You’ll just have to be a good girl, sweetie, and come along like a little lady {with us}.’

A little while later in the novella, Isabella actually commits the error of saying she will "ring" someone. If Americans mistakenly believe they can write English characters simply by throwing in the occasional "I say" and "jolly good," then I suppose the British can do the same for American characters with the liberal use of "I guess" and "that guy." But I would expect any writer intent on fashioning believable characters to avoid the obvious mistakes.

I'll make the same appeal to Stevenson that I made to David Lodge: Ms. Stevenson, I want to help. When you write your next American, ring me.

Hubris, and Why pick on the Brits?

2006-01-15T11:34:00.000-05:00

I am struck by my audacity in criticizing the writing of gifted, experienced (not to mention published!) authors, with more talent in their little fingers than I could ever marshal with my entire being. Still, write what you know, yes? And I know how to speak my native language.

You might ask why British authors are the frequent target of my blue pencil. From a practical standpoint, aside from Americans, they're the ones most likely to be found writing American characters in English. However, the truth is, like many Americans brought up on Alice in Wonderland, Masterpiece Theatre and the odd royal wedding telecast, I have a soft spot for English culture and its literature.

I hereby vow to apply my blue pencil only to those I consider worthy. Please note that this rules out a great deal of the political realm; Dan Quayle and his potatoes, to use an example safely in the past, will receive no pesky instruction from me.

Onward!

David Lodge - needs speech therapy?

2006-01-13T14:59:00.000-05:00

David Lodge has been another favorite author of mine ever since I read his 1988 novel Nice Work. His first work of fiction, Ginger, You’re Barmy, was published in 1962 and he has been crafting wonderful novels ever since, in addition to books on writing and literature. Therapy (1995) is the story of Laurence “Tubby” Passmore, an English scriptwriter, whose troubles, beginning with a mysterious pain in his knee, lead him into therapy of many kinds.

In the following chapter, we hear a phone conversation from the perspective of Louise, an American movie producer Tubby has just seen in LA. As much as I respect Lodge’s ability to portray individual voices, Louise’s speech is a confused mix of English and American, Hollywood exec and PBS narrator, and Lodge's own narrative style. Here goes:

Stella? … It’s Louise … Hi! … Oh fine. How about you? … Oh. I thought you sounded depressed on the answerphone. {Americans have answering machines.} […] Wait a minute, I got another call. Don’t go away …

Hi. That was Nick, calling from new York, just to say hallo {Unless Nick is a Brit, he called to say hello, or even more likely, hi.} […] Say, Stella, you want me to take your mind off your troubles with this really weird thing that happened to me yesterday? […]

It was about six o’clock yesterday evening. […] [T]he phone rings and I hear this British voice saying, “Hallo, Louise, this is Laurence Passmore.” Laurence Passmore? […] “Do I know you?” I say, and there’s like a pained silence for about a minute and then he says, “The people next door? Four years ago?” and the penny drops. {Not in the U.S., it doesn`t! Here, the light bulb goes on or, more simply, it clicks.} This is the guy who created the original British version of Who’s Next Door? Yeah. It’s called The People Next Door over there. When I was working for Mediamax they bought the rights, and he came over from England as like a consultant on the pilot, and I was assigned to look after him. {Could Louise say this? I bet she would have said something like I got assigned to take care of him.} But like the name “Laurence” hadn’t rung {didn't ring} a bell. “Didn’t you have a different name, then?” I asked him. “Tubby,” he said. [...] [H]e said[…]: “I was wondering whether you would be free for dinner this evening.”

Well, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it would have been outta the question. Nick and I were {went} out every night last week. Every night. But as it happened, {it just so happened} Nick was away and I had nothing planned and I thought, what the hell, why not? I knew there would be nothing below the line {below the belt?} on this date. … Because once, when he was here before I made a play for him and he backed off […] [H]e turned me down, in the nicest possible way, because he loved his wife … Yeah, there are such men {men like that}, Stella. […]

So I put on something casual and drove down to Beverly Hills to pick up Tubby Passmore at the appointed time {Louise would have simply left this phrase out}. […] He looked just as {like} I remembered him, perhaps {maybe} a few pounds heavier […] He said, almost accusingly, “You’ve changed your car,” and I laughed and said, “I should think so. {I'll say!} I must have {I've} had at least five cars since you were here …” […]

[W]e drive out to Venice, […] looking for this restaurant, and eventually he thinks he’s found it, […] [T]he look of it stirs a faint memory in me too. {This seems implausible. Surely, Louise would have said It rings a bell with me too.}

Tubby wanted to eat outside, though it was kinda cool and I was underdressed for al fresco dining … Oh, a sleeveless top, and that black cotton skirt I bought in your shop {store, or, given where Louise probably shops, boutique} last year. […]

[…] I guess I was like showing off a bit, letting him know I’m a pukka {This word, straight out of colonial India, is just not in an American's vocabulary; try bigshot} movie producer now, not just a TV executive. So when we’d ordered our food I figured it was time to let him have his {a} turn. “So what’s been happening to {with} you, lately?” I said. […] He said his wife wanted to divorce him {a divorce} […] He said it just blew him away when she told him … Nearly {Almost} thirty years – can you believe it? […] And then he gave me this long, soulful look out of his pale blue, bloodshot eyes. […] I realized that it was in this very restaurant that I had tried to seduce him all those years ago. […] We’d had a nice dinner and a bottle of wine and I’d snuck out to the Ladies’ room between courses to do some blow … Yeah, I was doing drugs in those days … Always carried a stash in my handbag {To me, this word evokes the Queen; purse or just bag sounds better.} […] But Tubby wasn’t into that sorta stuff. […] so I never let on I was snorting the hard stuff. I wonder {I'm surprised} he never guessed, the way I used to laugh at his little English quips. Anyway, there I was, feeling high and horny, and there was this nice clean Englishman sitting opposite {across from me} who obviously fancied {wanted} me but was too decent or too timid to take the initiative, so I took it myself. […] You see what I mean? This whole date was like a reprise of the one all those years ago. […] That was why he was so upset that I’d changed {traded in} my car. […] It didn’t seem to have occurred {It didn't occur} to him that my circumstances might have changed in the meantime […]

Hi. How did we exist before Call Waiting? That was Gloria Fawn’s agent. She passed on Switchback. So what’s new, I don’t suppose he {I bet he never} even showed her the script. […] Oh yeah, so like I was saying, […] [i]t was like you said to someone, pass the salt, and four years later he shows {they show} up with a salt cellar {salt shaker}. [… I said] I was trying to conceive […] Nick is keen. {Keen??? Impossible! Try up for it or, if you can't stand that double entendre, cool with it.} […] Anyway, this announcement stopped Tubby Passmore in his tracks, but he still didn’t get it. I think for a moment {there} he thought I wanted to have a child by {with} him […]

[Louise explains that she tried to console Tubby by recommending Prozac.] You should try it, really, Stella .. Well, there is one side effect, I have to admit: it makes it harder to have an orgasm. But as you haven’t got {since you don't have} a lover at the moment {right now}, honey, what have you got to lose? […]

[Louise signs off by saying] Speak {Talk} to you soon.

Phew. I feel better now.

It was agony getting through this chapter the first time I read Therapy. It should have been hysterically funny, but the flow was broken for me again and again. I finally bought a copy of the book and marked all my corrections in heavy ink, a very cathartic experience which I highly recommend to others with blue pencil tendencies.

In reading the chapter again, it occurs to me that anyone who says "like” as many times as Louise does, and moves between present and past tense so freely, as she does, would probably often replace "he said" with "he goes."

Mr. Lodge, before you write your next American character, please call me! I can help.

How it all began: clean my teeth

2006-01-08T12:12:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite authors, Margaret Drabble, had just published The Gates of Ivory, her long-awaited third novel in the sequence begun by The Radiant Way. I was reading through it at a delightful gallop when I was abruptly jolted out of the book by the portrayal of an American abroad, the prototypical Ugly American. Fair enough: Drabble is English and has no doubt seen her share; I'm American, and I have too. The problem? Read on. The American, a professional photographer, is trying to convince a Hanoi hotel receptionist to find him some bottled water:

'Watchamean, lady, ya not got none? Ya get some right now. Whatcha tryin to do, ya tryin to poison your guests? Ya get some, ya hear me?'
The other man, a tall, thin, moustached, melancholy film-technician figure, intervenes. 'She done understand,' he mutters. 'She done understand ya.'
'Sure, she understands,' says the fat guy loudly. 'She speaks English, sure she speaks English, when she feels like it, she speaks English. You speak English, dontcha lady?'
The girl behind the bar slightly averts her face, looking blank and bored. Again, mutely, she proffers a bottle of some kind of juice, and a can of beer. The scene has clearly been going on for some time. It is a deadlock, stalemate, a little international tableau.
'I can't clean my teeth in beer, for Chrissake,' says the fat man.

Well, knock me over with a toothbrush! Could any American possibly use the Anglicism "clean my teeth"? You could argue that a long-term expatriate living in England might have picked up this usage. However, this man and his friends are clearly different types altogether. Even leaving out that their idiom is a peculiar mixture of New York and Deep South, the teeth remark ... well, it set my teeth on edge.

After that, my critical eye began to light on other errors. American characters written by English authors are my particular speciality, but everything is fair game. My blue pencil is ever at the ready - figuratively, that is, although I will admit to some lightly penciled corrections in library books. When Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss was published in 2004, it helped convince those of us who take unsolicited swipes at other people's punctuation (or grammar or dialect) that we weren't alone, and that maybe ours wasn't a completely worthless pursuit. Put that together with the blogosphere and here we are. Welcome.