Wrong Vocabulary?

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So I've been reading a few stories here lately and while i've been drawn in by certain plots, I've been turned off of the stories to the point where i stop reading, by one big problem... vocabulary.

the stories i tend to read are of the teen - college age range, beacause i can relate to those ages, being a college student myself and the thing that turns me off a story pretty fast is when authors have their younger characters talking like middle aged people, it just doesn't fit.

college and high school age peole use a very different set of words and phrases.

maybe it's just me, but stories where the characters don't sound their age are a huge let down for me.

Kate Draffen is a great story that has the characters acting thier age.

i won't give examples of stories that have made me stop reading

Comments

Say wha'?

Since most of us have long ago passed our teen years, it's kinda tough to be up on current slang, etc. Not to mention that using slang terms can seriously date a story in a few years, when all the current terms are replaced by a whole set. So, speaking for myself, I try and use reasonably correct language with a minimum of slang or regional dialect, so that any future readers are able to (hopefully) understand and enjoy the stories.

But if you dropped a note to the author, indicating where usage is incorrect, most of us would appreciate it. And even possibly make the changes! ;-)

KJT

"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather


"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

it's not about slang

Karen, i under stand not wanting to use slang, as it can date a story, unless you're writing in a certain time frame, and then i would want the appropriate slang.

what i'm saying is that aside from slang, teens and those in their twenties are going to use different speech patterns, than older characters.

contractions are a huge thing. most people say don't, instead of do not. unless they're being forceful and say "Do not touch that!"

younger characters use a lot more contractions than older people do. just listen to how people around us talk.

persona;;y, and maybe i'm the only one, but the dialog in a story can either make or break a good story

Agreed, but . . .

When I first started writing I was told by somebody not to use contractions, as that was a "man thing". I have since tried to kinda listen to how as well as what people said around me. These days I use them pretty much the same way I do, i.e. most of the time. I do understand what you mean, the "Rissa Kerguellen" series of sci-fi books by F.M. Busby has the main protagonist not using any contractions, and it comes across as stilted and awkward.

The main time I forgo using them is when a character is P/O'd about something and is emphasizing something. "I did not give you permission to take my new skirt," she said through clenched teeth.

As for other speech patterns, that is going to depend as much on normal regional usage as it does age. PB and I were in disagreement about the spelling/usage of a particular word in one of his stories, until I finally pointed out that simply wasn't the way people talked in the South, then he conceded the point.

KJT

"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather


"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

Rissa

I find the Rissa and Bran characters strange creations, with one starting in the muck and molded into something so more, while the other starting as privileged and molded into something less. Yet in the middle is where they need to reach.

F.M. Busby is a man...

Puddintane's picture

...so possibly he was given the same bad advice.

I found Rissa Kerguellen fairly non-compelling for reasons of character as much as for dialogue, and it contained *many* manly stereotypes, including alternate takes on the "vagina dentata" and other weirdness, although he was arguably among the first to tackle homosexual and transgender themes more or less sympathetically, for a heterosexual white male.

Contractions may be present, or virtually absent, in the speaking vocabularies of many groups, including young people, and at least some writers treat them like dialect, with the reader expected to "fill in" (or more properly elide) intervening letters and syllables as necessary to comply with their own liguistic conventions, just as we don't usually bother distinguishing people who say "butter," "budder," or "bu'uh" from each other. Whether one *says* "can't," "cannot," or "can not," the underlying target for all these logisms is more or less the same, and too punctilious a representation can get in the way of the story, if people have to expend too much time figuring out what the heck is going on.

Write what you like... but people *do* tend to use contractions in speech these days, even when they might avoid them in writing, so it may be useful to distinguish the two, since is says something about the individual so described, that they *perform* a "rule" they've failed to internalise, and their performance slips when the medium is less studied than writing.

Cheers,

Puddin' (or should that be "Pu'in'?")

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

I hope

my stories aren't some of the one's annoying you.

It would be kinda pathetic if I couldn't do a teenage voice considering I'll only be 22 in a little over 2 weeks- though, I guess the horrible southern-ese most of my characters speak could be just as bad.

Melanie E.

you do it right

no, you do a great job at having you characters seem the right age, i loved your story Oh Cheers (will there be a sequel?)

Eeerg (rocks hand)

Not really, I thing 'vignettes' is a bit more appropriate. I still wanna do the crossover with Edeyn when she gets time, and I'm working on the three RPG gaming weekends as well, though those will contain minimal TG and is mostly an excuse to do a fantasy story and introduce a universe for future stories (hint).

If people REALLY want a sequel, leave me a PM with ideas of what you would like to see. I can't promise anything, but if there is enough interest I could probably work it.

Melanie E.

Twenty freaking two! You're twenty two, Rasufelle?

When I was twenty-two, Gerald Ford was still President though Jimmy Carter was the presumed President elect for the last month and a-half that I was twenty two.

But then Kelly from Married with Children -- Christina Applegate -- turned 37 this week and KHAN! -- Ricardo Montelban in Star Trek 2 to you non Trekies, turned 88.

Hum, on contractions. I thought little kids, like say age four, didn’t use them, they got used more and more as you got into your teens but were frowned on in formal, business writing. Am I right on any of this?

I feel so old

John in Wauwatosa

John in Wauwatosa

Yes, twenty-freaking-two

Just think how well she'll write when she's as old as I am... fifty-three, later this month.

Dialogue...

Puddintane's picture

...is always difficult, but it's also part of the author's necessary tasks, and can be had from many sources. Try riding the bus, listening to conversations, listening to radio or television shows aimed at, or featuring young people, or going out to the cinema from time to time, and watching the audience as well as the film. Another potential source of realism is the Internet, where one can find blogs, websites, interest groups, and whatnot to suit almost any purpose.

http://www.whitefolksgetcrunk.com/
http://www.seventeen.com/
http://www.hannahmontanazone.com/

Subscribe to a few magazines. Write it off your writing income (if any) as research expenses.

Hand the story to a young person of appropriate age and ask them how badly it sucks, and why.

On the other hand, consider whether characters one doesn't know well enough to be real in one's mind or memory have stories that are really one's own to tell. If one knows nothing about cowboys, or Trobriand islanders for that matter, one might properly ask one's self whether one has anything really important to say about either that isn't a cliche.

If one is not familiar with today's youth, and the story demands it, perhaps the story might be better set in the past, since most of us were young at one time or another, or raised children who gave us at least a passing familiarity with the generation one next in the sequence of them, although that too may be a distant memory rather than fairly current reality.

Or perhaps one should tell stories out of one's own experience as practice, before stepping off into the great unknown.

Cheers,

Puddin'
-------------
When I'm actually assembling a scene,
I assemble it as a silent movie. Even
if it's a dialog scene, I lip read
what people are saying.
--- Walter Murch

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Great Unknown

This is one reason I tend to create imaginary worlds when I work. I'll be honest, as an observer of humanity I am less than skilled at picking up demeanor or language, but as God of imaginary worlds, nothing is unknown, so I can paint cultures and characters as I desire.

A hard thing to do

This is the hardest thing to do in writing. I think it goes beyond just dialogue, beyond age, and beyond vocabulary really. But those are the things where it becomes most obvious.

It is really the secret of how to show a story rather than just tell one. Yes, the writer has to "know" the characters and the setting inside out. But then they have to convey that. For me at least, that is much more important then the plot, and I don't think I ever get it right - I get close (I'm told by kind peeps) but a month later it always sounds like me trying to imitate some other person. This is beyond research in the Urban Dictionary, I think. It takes, I think, a kind of voluntary possession. And trying to get there both propels my writhing and makes it annoying to try to create. I have seen it done; if I figure out how to do it I'll write some good stories.

Hug, Jan

PS: is it possible to get a RSS feed for Laika's comments, so I can read them before she decides to remove them?

You had it nailed in the SkyLetters

Well, Jan, I thought you did some really fine teenspeak in the Letters from Sky, but I'm so old, how could I tell. Brittany, did you read the Skyletters? What did you think of Jan's 13 year-old protagonist? Hugs, Daphne

Daphne

I thought so too,

I kind of thought so too at the time, Daph, but when I read it now I think it sounds like me imitating a thirteen year old. But thank you for saying so and, I confess, ' do think it is close to the sound I wanted.

(all of which is very strange, since I didn't actually write those letters anyway.)

Joy, Jan

Two Problems with Young Dialogue

terrynaut's picture

I have a couple problems with young dialog. For pre-teens, I notice a lot more bad grammar in their speech, but a lot of bad grammar can be distracting to read. I know it's accurate but it can detract from a story. It's the same thing with thick accents. Thick accents that are written out phonetically slow me down when I'm reading.

The second problem I have is that a lot of teens often talk a lot without saying much. You'd have to write out a lot more dialog to get the point across. That can be annoying too. It can unnecessarily drag the story out.

That's just my two cents.

- Terry

Dialogue Rule of Thumb

It is far better to write dialogue in a common tongue than it is to try to write dialect -- when you can't.

Do you remember the music video of Michael Jackson pretending to be a "Bad" gang member? Even with the legimate gang members behind him, it came across as absurd.

Dialogue should be age appropriate, but not many can write it effectively. In my opinion it was the dialogue that made "Juno" such a huge success. A movie with great dialogue comes along about once a year, if that.

The writers here should strive to achieve appropriate dialogue, but the readers should understand that Diablo Cody isn't posting free stories on BC.

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

Teenspeak

I am guilty of having teens speak in as educated manner as I can. How many of us can really understand what teens are saying today. Language is fluid and evolves. It changes from one generation to the next. Cool is hot, bad is good, I just don't know. Having the teens talk in a more educated manner means more information is correctly passed to the reader, what ever their ages.I do know many teens who could have a nice talk with the Queen and be understood.

If I were trying for that kind of realism, I would do my research and write in teenspeak. Then my work might only be understood by teens. I hope to reach a wider audience. So it is one toke over the line riding into the desert on a horse with no name into the strawberry fields forever.

Love,

Paula

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

The Coda
Chapterhouse: Dune

Paula

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

The Coda
Chapterhouse: Dune

teenspeak

I'm not saying an entire story needs to be filled with teenspeak, and for anyone who thinks teenspeak is not understandable, thats just ignorance. i'm only 25 and i can easily understand what younger people are saying, i can understand my peers at college and i can contribute and understand discussions on a highly intellectual level as well.

as for stories, the author/narator should in my opinion, always use proper grammer and avoid contractions, when a characer is speaking in dialog, it should sound as such. teens should sound like teens, again, i'm not saying slang or swearing, i'm talking word choice (if you use a 'big' word, take a look in the thesaurus and pick a simpler word that a teenager is more apt to use) adults like adults and people like doctors and lawyers should sound like such

Paula, no offense, but your most recent tory is one that turned me off. i just couldn't beleive the characters.

as for accents, i can't stand when people type those in phonetically. if a character has a heavy accent, i find it sufficient for the author to point that out, if i then want to imagine the accent when i read the dialog, thats should be up to me.

If I was doing teen speak

Angharad's picture

as it really is, apart from being unintelligible except to other teens, I'd be worried about wearing out the 'F' key. I'd also have to categorise the stories as adult because of the language.

Remember teenagers are like insect pupae, their brains are soup while they get ready to turn into human beings by the time they're thirty :) Seriously, their brains are different to adults and younger children that is scientific fact.

Angharad

Angharad

Exactly right...

Puddintane's picture

...but it's also true that all of us are expert "code switchers" fully capable of talking to the Queen without necessarily saying, "Wussup, bitch?" and responding in kind when addressed by many people, not just one's "peers," whomever they might be. And yes, I do know that the objective case with "who" has almost disappeared in any but the most formal speech and "serious" writing. That's part of my point. "Whomever" and "whoever" are both "correct," but in different contexts.

If a character's dialogue is inconsistent, or varies from time to time, why so do we all.

For the most part, it's when we try too hard to be correct that the reader stumbles. It's better, I think, to *suggest* a dialect than to ape it, and a very few "dudes" and "hoochie mamas" go a very long way.

Cheers,

Puddin'

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

I have got to use that

Okay If one of my characters says that to HRM Lizzie?
>>
Wussup, bitch?"
>>

I'm having a hard time not ROTFL.

Mind you I have a scene in Timeout I wrote a long while back, now being prepped for edit, where my heroine says some very insulting things about Prince Charles AND the Queen, though all in good fun, but then us ex colonials are required by law to insult the old country, nothing personal.

I worry my characters, mostly teen/college age come off too old or formal but I do work with a lot of people in their early twenties, some teens and many customers are that age. Mind you a bank is pretty formal but then we are not your normal bank.

Language is a situational thing. Guys in the bank talk one way but I’m sure they talk differently at the auto parts store, during a pick up basketball game, in church and so on.

And teens curse up a storm. I remember these two middle school gals on the Milwaukee County bus Route 21, say14 or 15, who all the pauses, punctuation marks and such of speach were,

mother-fu**er,

shi*

and a few other similar words. And they were not fighting, were in a good mood and were obviously friends.

John in Wauwatosa

John in Wauwatosa

Wassup...

Puddintane's picture

...I have no problem with lifting two words, which aren't *my* two words to begin with, but the generic greeting of a certain class of male to a certain class of women, "bitch" being used generically for "woman" and "wassup" as a contraction, although not usually marked with apostrophes.

In context, it's not *especially* contemptuous, just generically so. Out of the proper context, of course, it's just rude.

Stay crisp, whoadie,

Puddin'

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Heh--I know what you mean...

I nearly did wear out my 'F' key writing the early chapters of Leeway. They say 'write what you know,' and I figured, being my first serious attempt at fiction in thirty-plus years... well, let's just say my friends and I were a pack of foul-mouthed little gits at that age.

Of course it was all contextual; I never spoke like that around my grandparents, or my aunts and uncles, or in the presence of adult strangers, though I did around my parents more than occasionally, when I wanted to annoy them. Which they chose to ignore, other than occasionally pointing out how ignorant it made me sound, on the assumption I'd grow out of it, which I eventually did. I suspect if I'd gotten a more satisfying reaction out of them it'd have taken a lot longer.

As for categorising the story, I just left it at 'Mature Subjects,' as the description of that category sounds about the same as the US movie rating PG-13. Which seemed appropriate for an unvarnished look at the world through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old.

On the original topic, I've written my teen characters' dialogue as the teens I hung out with in 1975 spoke, as best I remember it. Since it hasn't been 1975 in a long, long time and anyone who was a teen then probably doesn't remember it any more accurately than I do, I figure I'm fairly safe from criticism on that front.

Wrong Vocabulary?

Britney; Myself I just enjoy reading the stories here. But, most of the teens I've been around lately start talking like there doing there text mail, apprevating every other word and they almost talk that way too. Just a Senior Citizen talking here. Richard

Richard

Dialogue and contractions

are being used more and more, and dialogue is getting to be dfficult when writing about teens of today. Most teens today are notoriusly bad spellers to begin with, either that or they don't watch what they're doing when they are writing. Contractions are being used more and more frequntly by teens and women. It is easier than saying the full word, and saves printing space too. Contraction use is no longer a "guy thing", just as auto mechanics, welding, wrestling, military service, truck driving, an countless other professions are no longer a "guy thing". More and more women are involved in all of these professions, and more.

When we write our stories there is nothing wrong with a woman using contractions to save printing space. However, it is not the contraction itself that is mainly a "guy thing", but the way it is used. Notice I used "it is" instead of "it's". Had I used the contraction in this sentence it could arguably be a "guy thing".

So yes, contractions in stories written by women is a good thing, if it is done right.

Be strong, because it is in our strength that we can heal.

Love & Hugs,
Barbara

"With confidence and forbearance, we will have the strength to move forward."

Love & hugs,
Barbara

"If I have to be this girl in me, Then I have the right to be."

Huh?

Well, maybe my family was just weird, but I'm pretty sure my mom has always been more likely than my dad to use contractions. I never noticed any difference in how (or how frequently) my sister and I used them, but given my gender "issues" I suppose that's neither here nor there.

Then again, my mom is mechanically, mathematically, and scientifically inclined, whereas my dad is more into literature, poetry, theatre, semantics, and philosophy. So naturally his speech tends to be somewhat more precise, particularly when he's pedagogically pontificating, as is his wont.

As for your example of where you pointed out yourself using "it is" rather than "it's", that doesn't strike me as a guy/girl thing at all; more like the kind of unconscious affectation we tend to slip into when writing rather than speaking. For example, in the above paragraph, I rarely use the words "whereas" and "wont" (as opposed to the contraction "won't") in actual conversation.

Heck, I don't even remember my prim-and-proper grandmother, a member of high society in my home town, ever making any effort to avoid contractions in conversation. About the only thing she did along those lines that I can think of, is that I seem to remember she'd be more likely to use the contraction "it isn't" rather than "it's not," probably because if you run the latter words together it sound like you're talking about a vulgar bodily fluid.

Avoiding the use of contractions in spoken conversation tends to sound kind of pretentious and stilted to me, regardless of whether it's men or women doing it. It's the kind of thing my French-Canadian professor of Chinese history used to do that made him sound so annoyingly supercilious and pedantic.

Vocabulary

I'm not sure that we are getting the message here. It's not, I believe, limited to "teenagers" or "young people" - it goes further than that.

I worked at the University of California for the past 10 years and I think I've heard it all. The patterns are real, but they are broken into more groups than young people and adults. There is a huge difference in vocabulary that is regional in nature. Another criteria would be socio-economic class. Race would be another. Then of course you have different mixes even with this small sample. Region/Income/Race mix them up and you automatically know there's a difference - even if you can't define it.

Fresh Prince of BelAir was an example of this. The entire show was based on the premise of cultural differences.

So it is with HS and College students. They are as varied a group as any age group. Certainly there is a difference in the way a businessman and a teamster talk. Or a liberal and a redneck (sorry, I couldn't resist).

If you want to start to learn the differences, invest in a night class at your local community college, or volunteer to work with teenagers. I guarantee it will open your eyes. And, while a subset of "young people" would wear out the "F" key, so would some subsets of adults. And, if you REALLY want an eyeopener, listen to a group of young enlisted marines. Aiiiyyeee.

In summation, it's far more complex than simple age difference.

Sorry for being so pedantic.

Beth

Regionalisms

erin's picture

My parents were hillfolk and as such, they seldom used contractions. The ones they did use tended to be non-standard, like ain't for am not and hain't for have not in first person. They sometimes said 'Tis or 'Tisn't for It's or It's not, though that was more common coming from my relatives who were older than my parents.

Think of the characters in the movie, True Grit. Eventually, Mom and Dad lost most of those hillspeech patterns and sounded pretty much like Californians except for their vowels and occasional colorful expressions.

As a child, I didn't use contractions much either and distinctly remember noticing this about the fourth grade when we moved back to California for the third and final time. I made a conscious effort to sound more like everyone else and this caused some friction at home since to my parents, I seemed to have picked up some rude speech habits. :)

Hillfolk are careful speakers, they don't run words together and while Northerners think they sound Southern, there is a distinct difference. It's a grouping of accents and speech patterns that reaches from southern New York to Oklahoma and northern Georgia, wherever farmers and miners work the hills. Think of Johnny Cash (Ark.), Buddy Ebsen (Ohio), Elvis Presley (Miss.) and Andy Griffith (N.C.). Don Knotts (W.V.), in particular, does not seem to have an accent to me. :) And in their native voices, none of them used contractions much.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Having It Both Ways.

I am, as usual, becoming, nay am, confused. The tenor of the blog is, as I understand it, that authors should ensure that teenagers should sound like teenagers on those occasions, in my experience rare, when they indulge in dialogue.

This seems a perfectly valid desire. I have a few reservations which revolve round the fact that dialogue seems, in the UK at least, to be an outmoded concept amongst that age group who have seemingly embraced a communication system based on disjointed monosyllabic utterances of an inconsequential and often offensive nature. However the principle appears sound in that it gives authenticity to the character concerned even if it makes it damned difficult for the author to carry a plot forward.

What I think is unfair, or it may just be indicative of the blessed arrogance of youth, is the subsequent statement that -

"as for accents, i can't stand when people type those in phonetically. if a character has a heavy accent, i find it sufficient for the author to point that out, if i then want to imagine the accent when i read the dialog, thats should be up to me."

Thoughts of a goose and of a gander and the sauce appropriate to each come to mind.

If authors are to be chastised for attempting accents, speech modes, and patterns differentiating people of different classes, educational backgrounds, regions, aspirations and generally explore the rich variety of language and sounds that such open up to us, why should they be be under an imperative to attempt the accents, speech modes, and patterns of teenagers?

You can't have it both ways. Although one cannot be blamed for trying of course.

I confess I am guilty of employing accents, usually false and frequently impenetrable, when the fancy takes me. There are various reasons for this, chief amongst which is that it amuses me. Otherwise, as it is considerably harder to write, why do it?

Least of my concerns is the reader's convenience. One is never going to please all of them, At best one might discover a few kindred spirits. And even they are not going to like everything you scribble. Stories and the words that form them are the writer's playground. At least if one is an amateur with no one to please but ones self.

Caveat lector, or bugger the reader, or .... damn how would you text that?

(Exits sobbing at the realisation of her own inadequacies.)

Fleurie Fleurie

Fleurie

Yah

erin's picture

For me, too, that was a puzzler. Do attempt to show the dialect of teenagers but don't try to show the dialect of others? Nope, does not compute.

Frankly, I tend to discount any criticism that includes blanket instructions to NOT do something. Dialectal differences are a tried and tested method of building distinction into characterization. It can get annoying if overdone, just like too much foreign dialogue in a story can get annoying. But it has its uses. Ask Mark Twain, Rudyard KIpling or any of a number of other famous and respected writers. I'm told that one of the sources of humor in The Three Musketeers in the original French is the contrast between D'Artagnan's country dialect and the more citified tones of Aramis and Athos. Imagine a story about a Texan in Boston or a Highlander in Oxford that didn't have some dialect indications. And remember the edict, show, don't tell.

Personally, I LOVE dialect in stories, as a READER. Because for me, reading fiction is about broadening my base of experience, vicariously. I've never been to Newfoundland or Yorkshire but I do know something about how people from those places talk because of fiction I have read set in those areas.

Perhaps it is because I grew up with a family that spoke dialectal English in an area where other dialects prevailed. I'm pretty good at code switching. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

there is a huge difference

there is a huge difference between choosing a different word more appropriate to a character and purposefully misspelling a word to try and imatate an accent. think about that for a minute.

i haven't once said, add more slang, use text messaging shorthand or anything like that, because that can make a story just as unreadable as stories that force the reader to slow down and try to sound out what a character with an accent is saying.

most of the people who have replied here are either hot or cold on this. you need to find the spot in the middle. you need to have dialog that a reader can read without problems (use common sense, use proper punctuation, that means close quotes, something wich is often missing in a lot of stories, and read it back when writing and think, does that sound like something the character would say out loud?)

but also think, do all my characters sound the same? people have little quirks, favourite words and phrases. a great story is one where you can tell who is talking based on the words they choose. thats what the goal of my post was; to have realistic sounding characters.

differences

erin's picture

>there is a huge difference between choosing a different word more appropriate to a character and purposefully misspelling a word to try and imatate an accent. think about that for a minute.

I have. I did. Not that much difference, each is used for characterization. Each is a legitimate tool of a good writer. That was my point. Insisting on one in the case of young characters and denying the use of the other in analagous situations involving regional voices is inconsistent and contradictory.

Yes, balance is the key. But sometimes excess is exactly the balance that is needed.

All the tools are there and have been used to good effect by other writers. To deny the use of one as a fiat is not useful advice.

Please understand that I have been writing for audiences for fifty years; There is very little about writing and the tools of writing that I have not spent a great deal of time thinking about.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

...Ask Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling...

Puddintane's picture

Both of whom have been heavily criticized for their use of exaggerated dialect, in both cases often seen as exemplifying racist or patronising attitudes toward "persons of colour."

It's often difficult to mark the exact boundary between the use of dialect for "local colour" or "humour" and similar uses of dialect to express the contempt of a "superior" towards an "inferior."

How many of us can still view the "Charlie Chan" movies from the Thirties without cringing? Can laugh heartily, and without embarrassment, at the "Stepin Fetchit" character which lampooned the cowardly black servant?

We all of us have different accents, and any of us can be mocked by setting down *exactly* what we say. We write and read, for the most part, the same Standard English as every other English speaker in the world, and deserve the dignity of having set down our words as we meant them, not as caricatures of the inhabitants of the places we were raised.

Where I was born, we pronounced the "L" in "palm." If we met, and I wrote about you, should I (in the name of a faux "accuracy") make it plain that you (laughably) talked about "pahm" trees, or "pam" trees, or even worse, "pallum" trees?

What purpose would it serve? Other, that is, than to make life difficult for *all* of us, even the people who seem (to me) to say "pahm" or "pam", since they know perfectly well that the word is *spelled* with an "L", but that "people" don't pronounce it.

The same conumdrum faces the perennial "spelling reformers," who all of them take their own dialect of English and local accent as the "normal" standard by means of which all others are to be forced to conform to a single standard all around the world, and instantly transform all of modern English literature into antique curiosities for academics, as remote as Beowulf or the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. Ignorant twits, all of them, from Noah Webster to Samuel Johnson to George Bernard Shaw. The former, unfortunately succeeded, leading to the split between "British" and "American" spellings, which together with the various leakages across national borders accounts for half the editorial hassles which keep books printed in the UK, or Australia, or India, or Canada, from being reprinted and read in the USA.

Without the even more confusing use of IPA alphabets, we're bound to make a hash of it in any case, and fail entirely to capture the true nuances of local dialects. People from Boston, Massachusetts, in the USA don't *really* say "idear" instead of "idea," but use the intrusive rhotic "R," which is a horse of a different colour, obeying complex rules, and *not* like the "R" those same speakers use when they mean to say an "R" as in "rat".

The most sensitive way to convey an accent is simply to say it as description, 'he had a pronounced West Texas twang,' 'she spoke in the broad syllables of Wearhead (Northern England -- up near Scotland -- if one wanted to carry coal to Newcastle, it might be a good place from which to start),' and then get on with the conversation, as do *all* of us in real life. We become used to dialects, and accents, so that they quickly become almost as invisible to us as our own accents and dialects are. When we go off to live in places other than the place we grew up, our accents quickly turn into a medley of the place we are and the place we were raised in. If we go back home to visit, our former neighbors comment on the "funny" way we talk now.

One or two "ahl wells" or "nobbuts" are probably enough. More than that gives us the chance to botch it, to portray sounds that actual speakers of that dialect or accent would never use, and to sound as ignorant and prejudiced as writers as the audiences who enjoyed "Stepin Fetchit" themselves were, primed by racism to accept the premise that all black people were cowardly idiots, and laughable by their very nature.

The people who make dictionaries know this, which is why all of them define sounds in terms of words we already know instead of the linguistic terminology that actually describes the sound itself.

Cheers,

Puddin'
--------------------
There idden many can sheary now.
--- A Northumberland farmer

Which means?

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Couldn't agree more.

In my part of England we use the short 'u' and 'a' sounds. When writers try to express the accent the word 'up' for example tends to be spelt 'oop'. They expect me to read that with 'oo' as in book rather than boot which is irritating because some local speaker still do use the long 'oo' sound when talking about books. Our local literary genius is DH Lawrence and he sometimes tries to write in dialect indicating the local accent but I'm already reading it in the local accent so how am I supposed to pronounce his deliberate misspellings? I find the use of the occasional dialect word or sentence construction works wonders for establishing the way a character speaks. The occasional "Ayup sorry, it's rainin' tha knows" is more than enough to indicate that the second person singular isn't restricted to Biblical texts in my part of the world :)

As Puddin' says people who campaign for spelling to reflect accurately pronunciation need to define just whose pronunciation they wish to reflect. It's not even the Queen's English any longer. HM and her brood have one of the most peculiar accents in the country and one that is rarely heard spoken by anyone else.

One thing that surprises and delights me is that local accents have largely survived the onslaught of radio and television. Perhaps the real extremes have become slightly less so but in England, at least, accents can change greatly in just a handful of miles and that's wonderful.

Just one correction - Wearside (Sunderland) (not Wearhead) is in the NE of England south of Tyneside (Newcastle) and, as far as the locals are concerned, a long way from Scotland. We're a small country (3/4 size as an American once joked to me with some justification) and 80 miles is regarded as a long way :)

Geoff

btw it means 'There aren't many who can shear (sheep) now' ... I think - I'm not from the NE.

Wearhead...

Puddintane's picture

Probably has local names as well, Peasbody-by-the-Rock-with-the Hole-in-it for all *I* know. Wearhead at Bishop Aukland is a name more formal. It's on A689 just south of Cowshill, if that narrows down the area of search to any extent. Wearside is nearer the coast, and I do admit that Wearhead is a bit more to the south than due west. I used the direction with careless inexactitude. Mea culpa.

Here are the co-ordinates from Google Earth.

longitude: -2.222704916528706

latitude: 54.75166614892868

There's a perfectly lovely aerial photomontage of it, if anyone would like to take a look. A charming English village by every indication, set in a perfectly lovely landscape.

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Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Critical

erin's picture

>Both of whom have been heavily criticized for their use of exaggerated dialect, in both cases often seen as exemplifying racist or patronising attitudes toward "persons of colour."

I stopped reading your post right there. No one has legitimately criticized those two men for being racist who has actually read their bodies of work without an ax to grind. I don't need to respond to such an attack on what I said, it's not cogent or related.

Besides, the whole subject is very personal to each author. And I have not recommended wholesale or profligate use of spelled-out accents. I've merely pointed out that judicious use can be a tool for characterization, mood and place and some very respected authors found it to be so. I also said that declaring that no one should ever use that particular tool is bad advice for writers, and I stand by that.

- Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

No one has legitimately criticized those two men...

Puddintane's picture

I beg your pardon? George Orwell did. Edward Said did, although the latter with considerable nuance, praising his skill as a writer while excusing his occasional racist and/or colonial apologetics as being part of the zeitgeist of the times, as inexorable as the air one breathed.

http://www.george-orwell.org/Rudyard_Kipling/0.html

Whether or not their usage of racist and/or colonialist language might now be seen as ironic, or "mere realism," the fact remains that racist/colonialist rhetoric does exist in both their works. In one scene in Huckleberry Finn, for example, a steamboat accident is described in which someone says, roughly, that it's lucky that nobody got hurt, since there was "only a nigger killed." On the "realism" side, it's certainly true that many people back then *did* talk and think that way, but the depiction is not a happy one for many whose ancestors suffered under those conditions, and an unpleasant reminder for those whose ancestors and relatives perpetuated that system of racist oppression until relatively recent times, long after slavery was abolished, overtly perpetuated in a system of peonage called sharecropping, and a legalised slavery mediated through the poenal system as chain gangs and work crews.

If the harm is still *real* to you, it's hard to take the "modern" cosmopolitan view and admire the various *good* things the slave drivers did for those under their charge, or praise those literary figures like Huck whose primitive noblesse oblige prompted him to treat Jim, the runaway slave, better than most people of the time would have felt that he deserved.

I find it easier to believe that Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) was a covert anti-racist, because his sentimental novels, most of which were unparadoxically beloved of *real* racists, carried a hidden freight which can arguably be seen as disapproval. But he didn't, in his novels, carry that diaspproval as far as, let's say, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin *also* used stereotyped language but was a very clear indictment of slavery and of slaveholders, while at the same time being patronising and/or dismissive of the slaves themselves.

In later years, and in other venues, Clemens made his opposition to the "Establishment" more plain, but most of those exculpatory works are rarely seen or studied these days, leaving Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and the Connecticut Yankee as exemplars of his ouvre, "children's books," on whose audience the subtleties of his art are often lost.

>> respond to an attack on what I said...

I fail to see an "attack," but rather a disagreement. My own view is that it's difficult for a writer to understand the full context of every reader, and what may seem innocuous to me may, in fact, offend someone else, as evidently the mere fact that Kipling and Twain have been attacked did you.

When one depicts cultures, speakers of languages, ethnic groups, or anyone one doesn't fully understand, it's easy to be unkind, or rather, to be *perceived* as unkind, because those depictions are rarely accurate. It's the inevitable inaccuracy that I object to, and it is inevitable, as Geoff accurately pointed out, because it makes assumptions from the outside looking in, rather than from the inside looking out.

I prefer the view from the interior. It's more fun to read, I can hope to learn something real from it, and it instantly arouses my sympathy, where the view from above, or from the outside at least, may raise my hackles in an instant and the story itself is lost in the fog of vague externals.

Perhaps you are more multiculturally fluent than I am, and can handle dozens of context switches in the space of a few pages without offending anyone, or making anyone laugh. More power to you, and very good luck.

Cheers,

Puddin'
----------------
...[T]he "poor whites" of our South who were always despised, and frequently insulted, by the slave lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them. And there was only one redeeming feature connected with that pitiful piece of history; and that was, that secretly the "poor white" did detest the slave lord, and did feel his own shame. That feeling was not brought to the surface, but the fact that it was there and could have been brought out, under favoring circumstances, was something--in fact it was enough; for it showed that a man is at bottom a man, after all, even if it doesn't show on the outside.
--- Mark Twain, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.
--- Rudyard Kipling

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Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

It's All in the Ear

Such a lot to get one's teeth into!

Basically though I am with Erin on the matter of dialect. Admittedly because I have used some of it in my own scribbles and have a built in reluctance ever to admit that I might be wrong.

To start with the past. Erin did use the phrase 'legitimately criticise' which in itself of course leads us down interesting by roads of argument and personal prejudice and preference. For example George Orwell is mentioned as being amongst such critics which is a little rich as he himself has been widely criticised for his patronising attitude to those of lesser social standing and education in 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. The pot calling the kettle shitty arse I think.

He was, as was Kipling, as we all are, a product of his time. You can't condemn people for when they were born. One can of course bewail, rather sanctimoniously it always seems to me, man's inhumanity to man as a general principle, but to call some one a racist because of what he wrote at a time when practically all of his contemporaries shared his views seems to me to be less than productive. To judge the past in the light of modern sensitivities is to condemn all our ancestors. Not just for their attitude to slavery which indeed hardly impinged on the lives of the great majority of people but for the general treatment of the poor and uneducated, the defenceless poor of whatever colour who were exploited, who starved and who died at an early age, ground down by poverty and the conditions in which they worked.

Perceptions of cruelty and inhumanity are, alas, comparative things. For example I would consider the death penalty as a barbarous behaviour and appalled that this view is not yet universally shared.

To get back to dialects.

Puddintane mentions Chaucer and Beowulf although I am not too sure of the point that they illustrate. But The Canterbury Tales at least should be read in its original rather than later 'translations'. Although it requires a greater effort the rewards are enormous. And it is fascinating to explore the language. This, I think, is what Erin feels when she talks about dialect. It does make the reader work harder but it, if authentically well done, brings an added dimension.

(I don't make this claim for my own forays into dialect which are on a lesser scale and largely for my own amusement.)

I also disagree with Geoff. I don't think it is sufficient to suggest an anaemic version of the dialect. No more than Charles Dickens would have transposed only the occasional V and W in Sam Weller's speech. Or appended a footnote that the reader should imagine it to be done.

I am a Lancastrian by origin so I grew up with thee and thou or tha or thi singular and plural. I now live in Derbyshire and can affirm that a Jeevesian "What ho old chap' would not quite have the same authentic ring as an 'ey-up mi duck' in the mouth of an old local. I share his delight in the survival of regional accents dialects but if one delights in them why not try to represent them?

And what of the poetry of Robert Burns? So much easier in In standard English with just a footnote mentioning the need to throw in the odd Och Aye?

And the other dialect poems?

To tie it all up, the first verse of a poem in a Lancashire accent. Written at a time when the cotton workers were starving because of their refusal to work the cotton from the South during the American Civil War.

Tha'rt welcome, little bonny brid,
But shouldn't ha' come just when tha did;
Toimes are bad.
We're short o' pobbies for eawr Joe
But that, of course, tha didn't know,
Did ta lad?

It was written by a Samuel Laycock and those who are interested can Google for the rest. Of course it demands a greater effort to read than if it were in standard English. But if it were .... well I don't think it would be anywhere as near so good.

Fleurie Fleurie

Fleurie

Puddintane mentions Chaucer and Beowulf...

Puddintane's picture

Part of the problem people have with both is the orthography.

Spelling reforms, which is what dialects spelled out often are, disguise both meaning and relationships between words, since English vowel and consonant shifting often makes pronunciations different when a word is affixed or prefixed to make a diferent word, moves a few counties over, or travels halfway around the world.

Scots is different, as it has a dictionary and a bilingual government web site now. One could make a case for similar treatment of many English dialects, and perhaps we should, but in the meantime we muddle along.

It's far more than the difference between vocabulary words; we al get used quickly to calling "the boot" "the trunk" when put upon, but should we use one spelling for the Received English "shedule" and the American "skedule?" The "schedule" spelling gives us a hint that there's something complex going on, but the trigraph is amenable to rule-making so a single word can serve for several nations.

We don't learn to read as adults by puzzling out letters, but by the overall shape of the words. Changing the shape of a word reduces us to the reading level of a child, and makes all of us mutually mutually illiterate, impoverishing us all.

As long as one keeps the first and last letters in place, and doesn't change anything but the *positions* of the letters in the middle of a word, almost all of us not dyslexic have no real trouble in reading scrambled sentences like this:

Spnelilg rorfem is ctulaurl valnadsim.

With just a bit of practice, it becomes second nature, and one can even detect "misspellings," though it's harder to figure out where the mistake is.

Here's the same sentence, just for clarity:

Spelling reform is cultural vandalism.

But now try putting in a more-or-less phonetic representation of any one of the thousands of English dialects. Is it quite so easy? Are "culla" and "cuhlr" the same word, being roughly the London pronunciation and the Midwestern American versions of "colour?"

SpeliN reefaorm iz cuhltchyurl vaendlizm.

Zbelin ruhfuhm iz cltschl vahndlisn.

Now try spelling the above sentence in a thousand different ways. Shall we set the printing presses humming as we duplicate the worlds great libraries of the English tongue into every local dialectical spelling? The Scots can't even manage it for the entirety of government websites, and they have a standard, despite that fact that northern Scots is different from Glaswegian Scots, much less Proceedings of the Experimental Psychology Society or Tom Sawyer. What's the Scots dialect for the Negro slave dialect of the 1860's?

What do we do about the extra letters we'll really need to accurately represent the twenty-eight (or more) vowel sounds found in English? The twenty-four (or more) consonants? If we're going to do dialects, we shouldn't burden people with the fuzzy vowels and consonants which have few stable referents across the English-speaking world.

As Geoff pointed out, an outsider's version of his dialect looks a bit thick-headed from the inside, because the "phonetic" transcription is anything but transparent, and presupposes a "correct" manner of speech of which all others are mere variations.

The trouble is that none of us *know* the "correct" version, but only our own. So my own pronunciation of Burns' "brilliant" rendering if Highland Scots English is probably nothing at all like he imagined, or like that of any other dialectical group in the world.

Shall we imagine a contest, in which Australian, Irish, Welsh, Midlands, Lake District, New England, South Carolingian, Texan, Indian, South African, and Canadian reciters of Burns compare their separate "authenticisms?" Does anyone imagine that they'd all sound the same? And if not, then what's the point?

We're all producing wild distortions of reality, at least some of us in the fond but utterly fallicious belief that it paints an accurate picture of something, when in fact it rapidly becomes a caricature whenever it travels more than a few miles from wherever we call home.

It's notable that the usual examples one sees of "dialect" works are poems, usually shortish, and sentimental enough that one can predict what's being said, even if words go a bit fuzzy from time to time. Try reading a text in nuclear physics in dialect, or study for an examination in law.

>> To judge the past in the light of modern sensitivities is to condemn all our ancestors.

Well, don't we? We all of us spring from murderous bastards. We all of us tell the same stories, with different characters, but do very many of us see our vicious ancestors as people to emulate in the present day? I think most of us pick and choose our heroes with more discernment than that. We say, "Well, Arthur, if he existed, had some good ideas about chivalry and all, but his personal relationships with his highly-dysfunctional family left a lot to be desired, and sending his thugs off hither and yon to kill people probably wasn't terribly nice. We don't do those things today. Or most of us don't."

Tschearz,

Puddin'

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Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Perfectly lovely....

Puddintane's picture

But Shaw not only wanted spelling reform, he wanted to replace the "ugly" Roman alphabet with a far more attractive one of his own invention, what's now termed the Shavian Alphabet with its very own Unicode glyph space:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

and providing even more work for typewriter makers, except they don't actually make typewriters any more, do they?

It was also designed to be quicker to write, forming a type of shorthand, and the man who actually created it went on to turn it into a fullfledged shorthand he called Quickscript.

Cheers,

Puddin'

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

If tha does owt fer nowt. ....

.... do it fer thissen.

I can only applaud Puddintane's lucid, knowledgeable and well reasoned comment. It is difficult to disagree with anything in it it.

But I an not at all sure that it changes anything, At least as far as I understand the original nub of the question at issue. Or to be fair, as the comments have been wide ranging, the question that has exercised me. And that is the use of dialects by writers, and specifically by writers who do it for their own amusement as an interest rather than a source of income.

Such a writer starts with a language and a personalised view and understanding of that language which depends on his/her nationality, regionality, class, education, experiences, personality, etc., etc. It is not, as Puddintane and Geoff so rightly say, a 'correct' version of that language, but it is the one that best serves, the one with which he or she feels at home. I think it more than a slight exaggeration to call it a 'wild distortion of reality, and to state that it 'becomes a caricature whenever it travels more than a few miles from wherever we call home'. It is all that one has and on the whole fulfils its primary purpose of communication well enough. If one is to write then it is the natural choice of tool.

To this extent we all write in some form of dialect. Markedly so when seen from outside. It can say much about us, about our origins, our pretensions, our characters even. It is important. If what is written is a play the actors provide them. Are judged on how convincing they are. There is no instruction in the programme for the audience to take for granted that this or that actor will be speaking in this or that accent. With mere words bereft of an actors aid more imagination is called for; more work too from both the writer and the reader if dialect is employed.

To this end conventions have grown up to help. No exact phonetic rendering is expected. As has been pointed out such would be an impossibility as such would be open to a myriad interpretations. Such may well be adorned or modified by individual writer's whims and fancies, or hopefully acuity of hearing, but accents are largely convention based.

Sometimes they are unnecessary, sometimes they may grate on some readers, sometimes they may be over done by some writers, sometimes they are appropriate sometimes not. But the same can be said of stories themselves. Surely for an amateur the choice must be the author's? If he or she thinks that their use, and the extent of their use, produces a richer, better tale then that is their judgement. And if one is going to do it then I think it should be done properly. A sprinkling of 'nobbuts', 'beejazuses', 'och ayes', 'look you boyos', 'zut alors' and 'my sainted aunts', seem to me condescending, patronising, and generally irritating. Not to say the worst of both worlds.

A few loose ends to clear up.

I was hesitant about Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales because I am not sure if the reference was about the original versions as distinct from the modern text or about the modern text as distinct from a simplified spelling version.

>>It's notable that the usual examples one sees of 'dialect' works are poems, usually shortish, and sentimental enough that one can predict what's being said, even if words go a bit fuzzy from time to time. Try reading a text in nuclear physics in dialect, or study for an examination in law. <<

Fair enough but we are discussing fiction not works of reference. And when it comes to dialects then there are few quite as impenetrable as that of the legal profession. Nuclear physics is outside my experience but if technical texts generally are to be considered then such are hardly beacons of clarity. Give me a dialect poem any time. And if Samuel Laycock doesn't please then consider the same dialect on the same occasion in Thomas Armstrong's weighty 'King Cotton'. and try and imagine that written without recourse to dialect.

>> To judge the past in the light of modern sensitivities is to condemn all our ancestors.<<

>>Well, don't we? We all of us spring from murderous bastards.<<

Indeed we do but we don't go round condemning them all. Life is too short and the act would be meaningless. Nor, as Puddintane says, do we go round emulating the more vicious of them but then I didn't suggest we should. In looking at the past we indeed pick and choose with discernment. That is the one way in which we can live with it. Which brings me back to my comment above regarding judgement based on modern sensibilities..

I've probably missed lots more but when it comes to the gravity of faults rambling on with me ranks even higher than the use of dialect. Still it's fun and keeps me from scribbling works containing these faults. :) It's a public service really.

Fleurie Fleurie

Fleurie

I agree...

Puddintane's picture

>> And if one is going to do it then I think it should be done properly. A sprinkling of 'nobbuts'...

My own original recommendation was to describe a speaker and comment accurately on their accent, not with a "sprinkling" of anything, but no *more* than one or two indications (if one had an itch that just *had* to be scratched), and then stop, full stop.

But "properly" narrows the field down to native speakers and intimate associates, which is perfectly reasonable.

In that sense, Twain's use of "slave" dialect was moderately sensible, for his times, since he was familiar with it, had grown up hearing it spoken, and had the great advantage of referring to a powerless and oppressed group of people, but he couldn't possibly get away with it now.

The people his audience thought were "funny," or "quaint," have considerable power now, and can be dangerous when mocked, or when they feel they're being mocked. Like all groups of people, some are belligerent, some are violent, when "disrespected," and some stop buying the products of sponsors or enablers of this sort of speech, all of which are powerful disincentives to avoid it.

I rather like Twain, myself; many of his political opinions agree with mine, especially his views on warfare, which were quite enlightened for his time, but know well that "white" speakers can't use his dialectal "humour" around "persons of colour" in the USA without risking general condemnation -- perhaps even physical danger -- even if one tries to excuse it as "authentic," or "historical accuracy."

In some areas, this is not a matter of "artistic license," or a "mere quotation," but life and death, and poison if found in any manuscript submitted to an editor not intimately associated with StormFront or one of the many Christian Identity Movements in the USA.

If anyone has seen the charming Hal Holbrook monologue, Mark Twain Tonight!, one might notice that his dialectical stories are absent from it, unless they lampoon Western white men. There's a good reason for that.

The usages I object to, really, are those layered on like stucco over a botched job of carpentry, as in the Charlie Chan movies I mentioned earlier, where a faux "Chinesey" (to rhyme with "cheesey") accent is slapped over bad dialogue to make him sound "exotic."

If you grew up in Edinburgh, though, or have spent considerable time there and have a very good ear, more power to you if you want to write a novel such as Trainspotting:

>>>> It's nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth.

If you're familar enough with the accent that you can fill in the *music* of it, the *flavour* of the vowels, so much the better, but not completely necessary in this particular case; you can always see the film on DVD.

That novel couldn't have been written, wouldn't have the same raw power, would have, in fact, been profoundly silly, if it were written in Standard English.

But if you grew up in Edinburgh, and want to write a novel about the Texas Rangers, you'd best go to Texas and listen very carefully to how they *really* talk before setting pen to paper, or fingers to keys. A few "Howdy, pardners" is not enough, and probably too many, although one can usually capture the "mid-Atlantic" speech of many executives who spend time in both the USA (or Canada) and the UK well enough to pass as real. What one *can* do, and get away with it, is to describe characters as "speaking with an East Texas accent," and then toss in what might be an ironic "Howdy" on the part of a character who knows well enough how to talk in "proper" English but might still "show the Texas flag" from time to time.

In my own experience, I've seen rather more works making a vile hash of "dialect" than using it with what seemed like affectionate engagement, at least in my opinion, and it's dangerous in the hands of writers who aren't yet completely familiar with their *own* voice, and the voices of their immediate neighbours, yet want to stray off into the woods on a search for magic mushrooms.

Cheers,

Puddin'
-----------------
The accent got lost somewhere along the way. I'm a little embarrassed about it. When I arrived in LA I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult so I had six months working with a dialect coach and it's become a habit.
--- Martin Henderson, on "losing" his New Zealand accent when he moved to Los Angeles.

We arranged a meeting in Los Angeles with big name stars, but I had to drop the idea. I wanted to film in the local Soweto dialect that only Soweto youth can speak and believed that shooting in any other language would dilute the impact of the film.
--- Gavin Hood, on his film, Soweto, many of whose characters spoke tsotsitaal (the "street" language of Soweto).

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Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Spelling reform

Puddintane makes this astounding comment: 'We don't learn to read as adults by puzzling out letters, but by the overall shape of the words', and quotes this scrambled spelling sentence: 'Spnelilg rorfem is ctulaurl valnadsim.'

The fact is we dont *read* as adults by puzzling out letters; we read by the shape of the word, in the main. But when we come across an unknown word, we go back to letters. And not always successfully.

For years i've been using a lawn weed spray called Hydrocotyle. Usually i pick it off the shelf of the garden shop and take it to the counter. Once recently, there was none on the shelf. So i went to the counter and asked if they had run out of 'hy-droc'-co-tile'. The assistant looked at me as tho i was speaking another language. When i described what i wanted, she replied:' Oh, u mean hydro-cot'-tle.'

As for the scrambled spelling, it works only if we know the original current standard spelling.

As for the content of that sentence: Could i ask if replacing the horse and cart with a car; or the typewriter with a computer; or the candle with the electric light are also cultural vandalisms? Spelling is primarily a tool for written communication here and now. It is not a museum of linguistic relics.

Upgrading by increasing the effectiveness of the product makes achievement of the task easier. So upgrading spelling would also make learning literacy easier, and more available to many English speakers who at present are deterred by an unpredictable, unreliable spelling 'system'.

Astounding comment...

Puddintane's picture

>> astounding comment: 'We don't learn to read as adults by puzzling out letters, but by the overall shape of the words',

Perhaps the shape of that sentence was confusing. As presumably literate adults, we read most words as gestalts, and the order of the interior letters is relatively unimportant. While this may be astonishing when you see it happen, it's a commonplace of human perception.

And a lucky thing, too, or no one would *ever* be able to learn to read Chinese, or to decipher badly-formed Chinese glyphs, which have a complex structure and must be grasped as gestalts, although they can also be stepwise deconstructed if one wants to look up a particular character in a dictionary, or arrange them in particular orders.

Children learn the characters by rote, and are taught any of several systems of deconstruction so as to make them capable of learning new characters on their own through dictionary access, or to enable typing a character on a keyboard through a stepwise process which eventually resolves into a pick list.

With exceptions, since some characters contain glyphs that *may*, but sometimes don't, give a hint as to pronunciation, there is no way to "sound out" a Chinese character, as one can most English words, by examining individual parts. One looks them up, learns them by rote based on various forms of sound representation, which may include the use of rhyming chracters so simple that one is presumed to know them already, or phonetic bits, more or less like English letters, and in some circles any of various "romanisations" that make life easier for Western students.

I *did* offer a hint to what that troublesome sentence meant when I referred to being reduced to puzzling out words like children sometime later, but I probably assumed too much, since this has been a study of mine for many years, and forget sometimes how strange it all is when one stumbles across it out of any context or connection to one's own life and experience. I apologise.

But you can see the phenomenon in operation when you try to "proofread" a text. We have to slow down drastically, half our normal reading speed or less, and even then *many* errors will be utterly invisible until someone else points them out. On old-fashioned newspapers, proofreaders often "proofed" with the page placed upside down, a practice precisely designed to destroy the "normal" shape of words and make it easier to see their component parts.

>> Could i ask if replacing the horse and cart with a car...

Well, yes, in a way. There are many who deeply regret the frantic pace of modern life, the crowding, the lack of intimate community, first made possible by automobiles and then forced upon us by huge cities. Hardly any of us today have a "neighbourhood" in the same sense we might have had two hundred years ago, when an adult might spend their entire lives in the space of a very few square miles, within which boundary one knew everyone, every rock and tree, and one's permanent place in the world.

One can hardly argue that that *small* sort of world, that stone's-throw culture, hasn't been utterly destroyed for most of us, who may know people all around the Earth, who may be modestly fluent in two or more languages, whose "immediate neighbourhood" might be a hundred miles in diameter, whose family ties might stretch over thousands of miles, and who cannot readily grasp the immensity within casual reach.

Socrates was horrified by literacy, because he thought that it would lead to the degeneration of human powers of memory and reasoning, would make people lazy, since they could simply write things down and never take the trouble to actually *learn* anything, or puzzle out difficult problems -- thereby anticipating Cliffnotes and flashcards -- and eventually destroy civilisation.

Of course, it didn't, but he was right to be worried, since literacy has made us qualitatively *different* to the humanity Socrates was familar with, creating -- during childhood learning of reading skills -- brand new structures within our brains that enable us to grasp written words in mere milliseconds, far more quickly than we can hear or say them, and through these new brain structures to form associations and spark new thoughts at a rate Socrates could never dream of. We *perceive* the world differently these days, assuming we are literate, so we literally *know* things that Socrates could never imagine, not due to trivial things like science and technology, but through the development of the most revolutionary technology in human history, the written word.

Socrates lived in what to us would be slow motion, limited by the speed at which humans could articulate sounds in a strict one-dimensional and linear stream, able to grasp easily only those puzzles which could be described step by step. The syllogism is the quintessential oral paradigm, a linear list of things put in strict order, leading to a single conclusion.

Relational databases, object databases, multidimensional by their very nature, were first made possible by literacy, from which sprang immense complexity. The simplest example of an extended multidimensional paradigm is probably the crossword puzzle, completely different words and concepts sparking ideas that dart off in new directions, creating the possibility of many meaningful patterns within what looks at first glance like chaos. Crossword puzzles are impossible to contemplate in an illiterate society, and most of what passes for modern science and technology as well.

We're all of us *faster* than Socrates could ever be. In English, we can reliably understand words at up to 150–160 words per minute, but most of us, unless very fluent indeed, can't speak reliably at half that rate, and must pause, stammer, introduce "ums" and other stalling sounds to allow us time to gather our thoughts, or at least put them into coherent form. But looking at words makes multiple connections in our brains, and those connections can spark new thoughts that connect to other words, using new "hardware" that allows us to manipulate these words as quick as our new tools of thought, the internal mirrors of external words, a sort of mental "sliderule" which allows us to create new solutions by aligning, twisting, rearranging words to form new non-linear patterns. Most of us can read, or learn to read, much more quickly than we can speak or hear, 400-800 words per minute is fairly common, and we can "scan" for information much faster than that, running rapidly through many thousands of words per minute looking for clues or ideas.

In Socrates time, a human being with sufficient leisure might expect to be able to learn everything there was to know, because the processing speed of oral transmission limited the accumulation of knowledge beyond what a reasonably-sized group of scholars could hear and commit to memory in a single lifetime. When people died, *someone* had to start over again or that knowledge went into the bit bucket, lost in entropy.

These days, we can carry Socrates around in our cellphone memory store, and with an added chip might add a modest library. With access to the net, we add the possibility of having access to almost *everything* in something we can hold within one hand. We can access this huge compendium of knowledge, moderately close to the sum total of human experience, at random, or with a particular strategy, because we know how to read.

Cheers,

Puddin'

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Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

upgrading spelling...

Puddintane's picture

...is a snare and a delusion, although it may help people write notes to each other on their Blackberries, but their spelling reforms may not sit well with many of us.

The problem is the hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of English literature, scientifc documents, non-fiction, correspondence archives, and the like that will have to reprinted in order to allow the English speakers of this brave new world to lead a fully-literate life. In a lifetime, one individal *may* be able to process a single gigabyte of text, so we're imagining entire cities dedicated to recreating English culture for our future illiterates, millions of billions of pounds or dollars -- with numbers that large, the exchange rate becomes less important, since we know it's never going to happen -- dedicated to spelling reform instead of useful work.

And at the end, what's left is very expensive translations of historical documents. No one left, other than scholars, who can weigh the pages of original documents and imagine the people who wrote them, see the scribbled notes, the marginal corrections, the strikeouts and "stets," and understand them, as remote as any foreign language.

We all know what would *really* happen: the only books left would be, by and large, what our governments wanted us to read, with words in them that we are premitted to think and imagine. Have none of our perennial spelling reformers read Nineteen Eighty-Four?

The Chinese, energetic optimists all, have faltered in their implementation of spelling reform, although a few simplfied characters, the equivalent of complex older versions, have gained currency, but one still has to learn the old characters, so spelling "reform" has made life more difficult, the Chinese store of meaningful characters larger, not smaller, and the hoped-for universal romanisation put off until the hereafter, now slated for the year 3000, after everyone responsible for planning the change is safely dead.

I've got a better idea.

The Chinese system of characters has already shown itself capable of being used to flexibly depict many different languages, retaining a very high degree of mutual intelligibility, and the software for manipulating them is straightforward these days, so why don't we all adopt Chinese characters to represent English? Think of all the problems that will be solved when everyone, all around the world, can read any language with fluency based on a system which allows closer correspondence between thoughts and their representations!

Wow! What a tremendous boon to all humanity, a better Esperanto, and look how succesful *that* was! It surely brings a happy tear to the most cynical, nay, jaded eye.

Even more compelling, we'll never have to reform our spelling again!

There's still the translation problem, but what the heck, the Chinese have already done quite a bit of it already, so we could just use the Chinese versions of our existing corpus, reprinted at minimal expense.

And as a trés chic side benefit, we'll all be able to have individual "chops" made to print those little red glyphs at the bottoms of our signed documents. How cool is that?

Cheers,

Puddin'

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Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Uh,

There will still be horrible gaffes, due to translation errors and cultural difference.
Have you ever really read a whole lot of manuals or assembly instructions that were printed in English after being translated from Chinese or other languages?
And there have been many examples reported of literal translations of English turning into insults, ( or even, horrors, 'dirty' language ) in other languages, and vice versa.

I think we would need to double check every translation twice before accepting it.

One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness.
It usually comes back to you.

Holly

It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.

Holly

Double check...

Puddintane's picture

It was meant as a very small joke, not seriously, but I already have an assortment of chops, carved soapstone seals, so I'm ready either way. I carve them myself, so some are rather whimsical.

Cheers,

Puddin'

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Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

I stand by the full quotation of my sentence

erin's picture

I'll amplify it here a bit. No critic of Rudyard Kipling or Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) who has criticized them for rascist content in their use of dialect has done so in the context of their entire body of work and without having a pre-supposed conclusion supporting the critic's own agenda. At least, I have not seen any such criticism.

It's a wide brush that you're wielding there and it washes over my point with a lot of extraneous issues. Representation of dialects and idiolects in fiction has a respected history and a utility that no writer should have to give up because someone thinks there should be a rule. That's all I'm saying and pretending that I'm saying something more and arguing with that is not arguing with my point; it's building a closet just for arguing with yourself.

Authors should have access to all the authorial tools they can handle. If they misuse them, they misuse them. But putting some of the tools off limits is like the medieval church decreeing that music cannot, must not use the augmented fourth interval (ie. B to F).

Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

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