My Favourite Word

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I came across the word ‘glabrous’ in The Wild Life Of Our Bodies by Rob Dunn, who I seem to be quoting rather a lot.

Ninety percent of all American women shave themselves in order to appear more “beautiful”. Nor is this the extent of or eagerness for glabrous bodies. It is one thing to shave a chin, a leg, or an armpit, but we have come to love hairlessness so much that all over the world, people are having their pubic hair ripped off with hot wax.

Wonderful as this word is, it’s coming up in WordPress with a red wavy line.

But it is a word, nonetheless. Apart from skin, it’s most often used to describe the surface of plant leaves and stems. So if you meet someone who makes use of the word ‘glabrous’, that person may well be a botanist, just as a person who makes use of the word ‘viscosity’ is likely to be a mechanic, in which case it is most often used to describe the consistency of oil.

What is your favourite word?

I stumbled upon this website a while ago. It’s a collection of other people’s favourite words, and an explanation of why.

Category Vs Genre

Before I started writing I thought the word ‘genre’ sounded a bit wanky, and now I use it all the time, even when talking about music and I’ve no doubt there are friends who consider me a bit wanky for saying it, especially as it sounds ‘a bit French’.

From Google Dictionary:

Since ‘genre’ is such a useful term, once you start making use of it you wonder how you ever got on in the world without it.

By using the word ‘category’, probably. Or ‘type’.

‘Genre’ is such a nice word to say that it’s easy to overuse it, and sometimes ‘genre’ is used where ‘category’ would be a more accurate choice.

Example:

I think it’s a lack of exposure to contemporary YA lit that makes adults refer to it as a “genre.” Much of the time when people say “the YA lit genre,” what they really mean iscategory rather than genre, and that’s fine. However,  I recently attended a talk by an author who had been writing adult genre fiction and was working on her first YA novel, and she kept referring to the characteristics of the YA genre, as if all YA books were somehow fundamentally the same.

- In the library with the leadpipe

The same would apply to short stories. Short story is not a genre; it’s a length.

Likewise, women’s fiction is not a genre; it’s a marketing term.

And if YA is a category rather than a genre, then it follows that there’s no such thing as ‘the genre of children’s literature’. That, too, would be a ‘category’.

Right now I can picture my dad watching the Emmys & muttering “reality shouldn’t even be a category” & my mom telling him to shut up.

- @sarahlapolla

Related Link: Genre Theory — continued, from Michael Rosen.

American Words Used in School Stories

Down Under, we grow up reading American books and watching American TV, so the following words are familiar even if we don’t use them ourselves. That said, our language and culture is borrowing more and more from North America. High schools often have faculties now instead of departments, and I’ve heard teenagers start to say ‘math class’ instead of ‘maths class’. New high schools are calling themselves colleges.

FRESHMAN - A freshman is a first-year student in secondary school, high school, or college. (I worked that one out – the ‘fresh’ gives it away.) We call them ‘first years’. At university in New Zealand, a ‘freshman’ is often required to do an ‘intermediate year’, which is the first year of a university course. It’s relatively easy to get into university there, in fact you don’t even have to pass a thing at high school – you can simply wait until you turn 25. But if you want to do a rigorous course such as medicine, you’ll have to do an intermediate year of health science, from which only the top students are accepted for further study.

SOPHOMORE - a student in the second year of study at high school or university. In New Zealand they are called second years (university), or year tens (high school).

BLEACHERS – For the longest time I thought this was something you’d find in a janitor’s closet. Then I read about some kids kissing behind the bleachers, and I realised the handle of a mop would hardly provide cover, so I took the time to look it up. Turns out they refer to those tiered seats you get on playing fields and lining gymnasiums. I have no idea what we call them, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about ‘bleachers’. Perhaps we call them ‘forms’. They’re not standard equipment, in any case.

pic by Garrett Coyte

JANITOR – But we don’t say ‘janitor’ either. That would sound distinctively American. We just say ‘cleaner’.

GRADUATE – In New Zealand you don’t ‘graduate’ high school. You just get your qualifications (or not) and finish up. You graduate from university.

CAFETERIA – New Zealand and Australian schools don’t tend to have those huge dining hall set-ups. We had to eat a packed lunch outside. If the weather was terrible we were (reluctantly) allowed to eat inside our home classroom, but in year ten, several drop-ins broke windows, so we were all locked out no matter the weather. I have memories of sitting inside a cleaner’s closet with two friends because it was snowing outside. (There were no bleachers in there.)

If students want to buy lunch (which is usually a meat pie because salad rolls are for pansies) they go to the ‘canteen’ or the ‘tuck shop’, but there’s no place to sit down and eat lunch at a civilised table, unless you go to an expensive private school. Even then, such privileges are often reserved for seniors.

‘SIGNING UP’ FOR CLASSES – This sounds more like something you’d do as a university student, but American books tell me that high school students ‘sign up’ for their classes at the start of an academic year.

Down Under, there is a core of compulsory classes (English, maths, science) and even in senior high school, you have to select your subjects the year before, in the hope you’ll pass your end of year exams and get into them. Therefore, ‘signing up’ for a class is more a matter of visiting your subject teachers on the first day back and letting them know haven’t changed your mind about your subject choices over the summer holidays – or if you haven’t passed your NCEA courses, you’ll be having a sit down with a careers teacher to discuss your options. ‘Signing up’ sounds like there’s way more freedom than there actually is, because even with elective subjects, you’ve still got to choose something. (Maybe that’s the deception.)

CHEERLEADERS – I don’t know of any local high schools with a cheerleading team, and while I appreciate the strength and agility required, to me it is on a par with pole dancing. That said, there is a local gymnastics teacher who offers classes in cheerleading to little girls. (I suppose little boys could join in too, though I doubt it’s full of male participants.) Since pole dancing seems to have taken off lately, it wouldn’t surprise me if cheerleading took off in high schools here in the next generation. We do have cheerleading teams for regional and national rugby games, so the concept is here.

pic by arbron

HOMECOMING QUEEN – I’m so glad we don’t have this tradition. Really. It sounds just awful. We do have end of school celebrations.

PROM –  Some of our schools call them ‘balls’. Others call them ‘formals’. But I’ve not heard proms. What is it short for? There is usually an ‘after party’, which is shut down if the teachers get wind of it, then it moves somewhere else. Traditional high schools still teach their students ballroom dancing beforehand, and retain the ‘invite a partner’ thing, but more and more liberal high schools are deconstructing the idea of ‘partners’, and instead encourage their students to just turn up and have a good time when they get there. This is to avert the need for major stress for students who can’t find a partner, and avoids discrimination of non-heterosexual students, who are still banned from bringing their partners to the school ball at some schools, both state and religious.

In Australia, there is ‘schoolies’ week - an huge week-long party which started at Broadbeach. But not everyone is interested in attending that. It receives a lot of media attention every year because bad things happen there too. A lot of Australians have very fond memories of schoolies. In New Zealand, there isn’t a huge organised thing like that, but lots of students get together with friends and stay for a week in someone’s family bach (holiday home) or take a car trip around New Zealand before spending the rest of summer stacking shelves at a supermarket.

pic by Capt Piper

DRIVER ED – Are not usually run through a school in the way they are in America. Until recently, we got taught by our dads. But licences have gotten a little harder to pass, and have now turned into a formal industry. It’s hard to pass the tests unless you get taught by a qualified instructor. So more and more high schools now are taking the American model, and hiring driving instructors through the school. Unlike what I saw in Mr Holland’s Opus, these instructors are not their regular teachers, but contractors who specialise in driving instruction.

YEAR BOOKS – Most high schools seem to produce year books here, which are either put together by a teacher or by a group of students. Either way, I’ve not ever seen a ‘Student most likely to…’ situation. That sounds rather unkind to me. That’s not to say year books are not unkind, especially if the students collating photos have malevolent intention. Mind you, this is no worse than what goes on online, where ‘friends’ can tag you in the most heinous positions, and then share those photos with the world. I wonder if year books are on their way out everywhere. An online forum would be a less expensive way to share photos and memories of school. Mind you, its very fluidity is also its downfall.

 

An Alternative to ‘Luck’

I’ve been looking for an alternative to the word ‘luck’. I’m not a superstitious person, you see, so whenever I say ‘Good luck’ I don’t really mean it. What I mean is, ‘I hope things go well for you.’

I could always just say that, I suppose.

On the other hand, I also find myself saying things like, “That cat was lucky” (after a narrow miss with some wheels) or “I was lucky not to catch that stomach bug” or “Lucky that cup I just dropped didn’t smash”.

If you go about the place saying things like that, someone will eventually come out with something like, “But I don’t believe in luck!/No such thing as luck!”

There are two distinct definitions of luck and it’s worth making the distinction for those who don’t believe in it. The first is the original, superstitious sense. The opposite of that would be ‘fate’. I never mean that sense of ‘luck’.

The second sense is an evolution of that word, and is more analogous to ‘chance’. Whenever I say luck I mean chance. Perhaps the French phrase ‘Bonne chance’ would suit me better. The Japanese equivalent suits me better still: ‘Try your best.’ The Japanese aren’t a nation for blaming others for their own misfortune. (‘Fortune’. That’s another word with the same problems as ‘luck’.)

Lately I’ve been reading a book by Richard Leaky, and came across the phrase ‘stochastic processes‘. This phrase definitely suits my purposes. When I say ‘Luck’, for future reference, that’s the kind I’m talking about.

Will I sound like a tryhard if I actually use it, though?

“May the stochastic variables be with you.”

Yup. I’ll leave that one for the nerds.

Not what I thought

There are words I know in certain set phrases but which I wouldn’t think to use in isolation.

CONTINGENCY

I know this word from ‘contingency plan’.

I thought it probably meant something like ‘alternative’ or maybe a fancy word for ‘back up’. Nope.

What it really means: one possible eventuality (There are other specific uses as well, like in philosophy and logic, or business.)

How else it is used:

‘Gould has been correct to raise our consciousness to the role of contingency in life’s flow.’

‘As long as the engine of evolution is largely fueled by external forces — capricious events in the environment — then nothing in evolutionary history is inevitable. Each species is a contingent fact of history.’

- Richard Leaky, arguing in favour of multiple possible outcomes of evolution, from The Sixth Extinction.

Turns out this word is used often when speaking of evolution.

Just as we needed sugar for energy, we long needed salt for reasons of historical contingency.

- The Wild Life Of Our Bodies by Rob Dunn

This week I have also heard this word in reference to people sent from different countries to help out with the Christchurch earthquake, when ‘contingent’ refers to a gathering of persons representative of some larger group:

“Japan has sent a contingent of rescue workers.”

PROSAIC

I know this word from David and Margaret’s At The Movies. David describes movies as ‘prosaic’.

I thought it probably meant ‘composed of prose’, in the same way that poetry is ‘poetic’, but this didn’t make sense in context. I thought it was a good thing, not a bad thing to be. Now I’m not even sure if it’s etymologically related to ‘prose’ at all. (Scratch that: Here’s an example of ‘prosaic’ used in that way:

I hung up, relieved; my mental state, induced by such sudden contact with Granite’s fictional universe, was not one that could be shared with the prosaic writer.

- from Two Girls, Fat And Thin by Mary Gaitskill

What it actually means: matter-of-fact: not fanciful or imaginative

How else it is used:

“local guides describe the history of various places in matter-of-fact tones”

“a prosaic and unimaginative essay”

DESICCATED

I know this word from ‘desiccated coconut’, which my mother always has in her pantry.

I thought it probably meant ‘chopped finely into little pieces’

What it really means: dry, or preserved by drying

How else it is used:

A disc dessication is a degenerative condition that can be or become very painful.

The desiccation effect is due to dry katabatic winds blowing with great force down valleys from the polar plateau…

He thrust out a weathered and desiccated hand…

(My instinct is to spell it ‘dessicated’ — two s’s, one c — but no, apparently that is a common misspelling.)

The Inelegance of English

pic by delgrosso

I don’t like to be too hard on English. It’s my mother tongue and I feel a little defensive when speakers of other languages point out its (many) deficiencies.

That said, language is a kluge, evolved instead of crafted, so I’m sure every language in the world includes clunkiness that annoys poets and writers of fiction in particular, whose very job is to make their language sound nice.

In Japanese, for instance, they’ve got:

• a clunky verb conjugation called the causative passive
• nouns which can grammatically (and hypothetically) appear after an infinite string of modifying clauses
• a countless number of homophones which can sound like word echo unless positioned thoughtfully
• case particles which sometimes need a bit of masterful variation to avoid repetition
• passive sentences which can’t very easily be recast as active (due to the dual function of the passive voice in Japanese: polite indirectness)

I don’t know any other languages well enough to comment, though I suspect isolating languages such as Chinese have their own issues, which are different again from those at the polysynthetic end of the spectrum.

What about English? English falls somewhere in between extremely isolating and extremely synthetic and for that, English writers are lucky.

Here are a few things I don’t like about English; things which often need recasting in revision due to the general clunkiness of our grammar.

WHOM

This word isn’t inelegant in its own right. Rather, it’s on its way out. So, to use or avoid?

If I do use ‘whom’, I am making the choice to sound slightly old-fashioned. If I make the choice to avoid it, I’m also making a statement – to be modern –  and the sentence sounds a little wrong. So I must rewrite the sentence and recast the grammar, to avoid making a decision either way.

DANGLING PREPOSITIONS

Again, this comes down to fairly arbitrary rules set down by people who wanted to maintain a stark distinction between the highly educated and the plebs.

There are times when a dangling preposition sounds ridiculous, as noted by Winston Churchill who wrote something like this in a margin once, when someone had gone to ridiculous lengths to avoid one:

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.

But what if the sentence does not sound worse by avoiding the dangling preposition? What if it sounds fine either way? Do I dangle it or not? Either way, I have to make a choice: Do I want to sound like I read grammar guides on the toilet, or do I want to sound uneducated in grammar and thereby annoy the conservative pedants? There is no in between.

The Pluperfect

This issue is explained in detail over at Daily Writing Tips:

Let’s Hear A Little Respect For The Pluperfect

So, how to avoid writing a lengthy paragraph or story in the pluperfect? I agree that a story sounds no good when it’s littered with a bunch of ‘hads’ (in which you unavoidably up with a couple of ‘had hads’ in there somewhere).

If I’m unlucky enough to be writing a section of story which requires the pluperfect, I tend to write the first sentence of a paragraph in that clunky tense, then switch to simple past , in the hope that readers will pick up that we’re still in that tense, that we haven’t time travelled or anything… until notified otherwise. (Until a new paragraph, that is, when I must repeat the sorry saga over.)

THE PASSIVE VOICE

In fact, the word ‘had’ is generally hated, and the passive voice is another case in point. Luckily for those of us writing in English, it’s fairly easy to rewrite most sentences in the active voice, with no loss of elegance, meaning, nor shift in nuance.

So why do I find myself writing these damn passives so often? Through habit, I’m sure regular writers end up writing fewer passive sentences, but I still write too many in a first draft of anything. How nice it would be if the passive were not so widely hated.

HE OR SHE?

If only it weren’t rude to call a person ‘it’. If only. Instead, we must either write he/she (inelegantly), alternate he and she arbitrarily to avoid looking sexist, or recast all such sentences in the plural:

He who lives in a glasshouse shouldn’t throw stones.

>

People who live in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones.

Sometimes you just can’t rewrite the sentence as a plural (because for technical reasons there is only one person, and you don’t know whether it’s a he or a she.) What then?

Just use ‘they’? Even though the plural doesn’t agree with the singular? This is done frequently though it never sounds great. (See three sentences down for a naturally occurring example.)

An interesting article on this issue from The Awl

UNIVERSAL YOU

You hear this a lot on disaster documentaries. Ever noticed? Someone has miraculously escaped a bush fire and afterwards, in an interview, they’ll say:

You never thought it was going to happen to you. You could see the wall of flame coming closer and closer and you knew you were going to die and you…

I can understand why disaster survivalists might switch to universal you in interviews. When something is very hard to talk about, it’s easier not to talk about it in the first person.

What about in writing? (Good writing, that is?)

My own preference: When writing of one’s own experience, use first person pronouns. It’s just more honest.

See there? That sentence I just wrote? That throws up another thing I don’t like about English: It’s impossible to use ‘one’ as a universal pronoun without sounding like the Queen of England.

INTRODUCING RESTRICTIVE CLAUSES: THAT, WHICH, WHAT, OR LEAVE IT RIGHT OUT?

I really hate this one. I really do. This is the single reason why I don’t write with my Microsoft grammar check turned on. I get rude green squiggly lines all over the show. Every time I introduce a restrictive clause with ‘that’ it tells me I should be using ‘which’, or vice versa, or something. Apparently there are rules. But I don’t know. It’s regional.

I do know what sounds right to me, but I’ll be damned if I can explain it. (Ask a native Spanish speaker to explain que and cual – you’ll be equally flummoxed!)

Anyway, what sounds right to me, in my particular dialect of English, does not sound right to English speakers from other parts of the world, yet we all consider ourselves native speakers.

It would be very nice if English didn’t require anything at all at the beginning of a restrictive clause, and oftentimes we can leave that/which/what/whose etc right out and the sentence sounds better for it. (Especially if the word ‘that’ has already been used, for example, as a demonstrative in the same sentence.)

Then there are other times when the sentence sounds incomplete unless a relative clause is signposted with an interrogative pronoun. So I can’t just go plum leaving them out.

What to do? Write in your own dialect, I suppose, and accept that these words are subject to much regional variation, and you’ll never please everyone. (Unfortunately for me, I come from a country of 4 million English speakers, and another million ex-pats whose English has been corrupted, so I’m never going to win an argument based on numbers.)

THE SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD

If you’ve ever learnt Spanish in a classroom, you probably want to wring its miserable little neck, but we do have this in English too, you know. I think it’s on its way out. About four years ago I was teaching a New Zealand story to a bunch of New Zealand teenagers (who were about ten years younger than me) and after reading the story, I put a series of questions up on the board. One of the questions was:

How might the story be different if it were set in England?

I used to dish out sweets for any mistakes I made on the board, so one girl raised her  hand and said, ” ‘Miss, don’t you mean ‘How might the story be different if it WAS set in England?’ “

That was my first clear indication that the subjunctive mood is on its way out. To that group of young people, the subjunctive ‘were’ (in a hypothetical sentence including ‘if’) definitely sounded wrong.

To me, the subjunctive mood still sounds better. How can that be? Should I keep using it? How many years do I have, before my writing makes me sound like a dinosaur?

Don’t answer that.

Did you know these terms?

bastard title: The half title of a book found on the page in front of the title page.

bulky news: improved quality newsprint used for mass market paperbacks.

cineaste: a film or movie enthusiast, or someone who works in the movie industry. (It’s also spelt without the ‘e’ on the end.)

femjep: A story about a female in jeopardy. e.g. various works of Daphne du Maurier.

gorehounds: people who enjoy gory entertainment

high concept: This doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. In fact, it’s an unfortunate phrase because it’s a little counter-intuitive. Nathan Bransford wrote a blog post on this one, so I’m not the only one who didn’t sort of absorb its meaning.

pathography: A biography focussing on the negative elements of a subject, popularised by American writer Joyce Carol Oates. It can also be a study of the effects of illness on a historical person’s life.

steampunk: and to be honest, I still don’t know what ‘punk’ has to do with the genre. When I think punk, I think of a hairstyle from the 80s. The Great Steampunk Timeline. See What Is Steampunk, from Galleycat.

Thoughts on Learning Math

Or, as I would say in Australasian, ‘maths’, plural.

pic by Bryan Davidson

See Slashdot: Does Math Really Matter?

I found the comments section interesting. Especially this one below, which relates not only to maths but also to foreign languages and any field with specialised terminology:

‘The languages we know affect what thoughts we can think. While it is very zen to say that words hide meaning, empirical evidence seems to indicate that we cannot conceive of ideas that we do not have language to express. Math can express most anything which allows for thoughts right up to the limits of our hardware. It seems like this is also a good reason to learn a human language with different roots than your native one.’

*

As for me, I subscribe to the idea that Everything You Know Is Useful. So, if you know maths, new doors open for you. If you don’t know maths, those doors are forever closed… and you may not even know they are there. Not everyone has to be super-good at maths, but everyone should strive to be average. (Yes, I know that in itself is anti-mathematical!)

I wish someone had explained the relevance of maths to me in high school because I dropped it just as soon as I could. I went back to school in my late 20s to learn programming and networking. At that point I wished I had a better grounding in – not maths, exactly – but logic. I’ve never had a mathematical brain – whether by nature or nurture, words have always come more easily – and although I tried hard and was doing well in my course (until I realised I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working with the back end of computers and pulled out, that is). But the maths component was just as hard as it ever was. (Anyone else have THIS problem with maths: You study hard until you think you know it, do the test, think you got it, get the test back and realise you’ve made really stupid, fundamental errors? No? Just me?)

Back in school as a dreaded ‘mature student’, my maths teacher and I had an interesting relationship. He and I were often at loggerheads because this time round I wasn’t going to sit in the corner as the quiet girl afraid to ask questions. This time I had made a big financial sacrifice to go back into education and I wasn’t going to get left behind.

I remember part of one maths-class conversation went like this – though I can’t remember what the lesson was about:

Me: “What do you call that thing though? That… that thing you just did on the board.”

Teacher: “Who cares what you call it. Anyhow, that’s how you work it out. That’s all you need to know.” *flourish of the pen*

Me: “It must have a name.”

Teacher: “Oh, no doubt. There’s always busybodies going round sticking labels on things, but you don’t need to know the name of it, just know how to do it.”

Me: “…”

For my teacher, names were not important. His was what I call a ‘math brain’. (Though he seemed to be teaching maths under duress and protested his was not a mathematical brain at all. His reason? He’d pulled out of quantum mechanics as an undergrad.)

Whatever you call that man’s brain, me and he had different learning styles and we never did understand each other. For me: first comes the word, then comes the concept. Without a coat hanger, there can be no coat. For him: who needs a hanger when you’ve got a coat?

Some high schools now separate girls and boys for subjects such as maths and English. More schools than that are single sex, for the reason that boys learn differently from girls, apparently.

There may well have been gendered differences between me and my male maths teacher, though there always seemed to be major differences between me and my female maths teachers too. We never did understand each other. A large part of me thinks that any innate gender differences in maths are magnified by our culture. Separating boys and girls during maths might do nothing for the long-term and inevitable intermingling of the species!

I’ve been mulling upon the importance (or non-importance) of words in thought, however, and people do seem to fall into two categories:

1. Those for whom words are important.
2. Those for whom words get in the way.

I wonder if we should be segregating our kids less according to sex and more according to learning styles. I’d like to see a lot of research go into that.

What about you? Do you have a gut feeling about how you learn?

1. Do you sometimes have thoughts that you can’t put into words (because you don’t happen to have learnt the words)? Do you know the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything, and would tell us all about it, if only you could?
2. Do you, perhaps, speak more than one language? Does it sometimes frustrate you that a certain word exists in one language and not in the other?
3. Do you suspect your very brain is structured differently because of the languages you know? (Be they full human languages or highly specialised fields.)
4. Have you ever learnt the word for some concept and had a bit of a lightbulb moment (to borrow from Oprah)?

Proofing Peeves

Anyone who practises self-editing on a regular basis may relate to this: There are certain things that just get on your wick. Sometimes these little things don’t seem to bother anyone else. Let’s call them idiosyncrasies.

Some people can’t abide ‘alright’. Others can’t bear ‘O.K’ spelt ‘okay’. Others insist that ‘scepticism’ is spelt ‘skepticism’ or vice versa. More and more people avoid the semi-colon.

Here are my own bug-bears. Some of them, I know, are peculiar to me and hardly anyone else.

1. The comma-splice

(Using a comma in place of a full-stop to create the illusion of a connection or a fluidity between two separate sentences.)

I’m slowly learning to live with this one, but I seem to have a strong sense of a sentence: ie. where one starts and where I think it should end.

I don’t mind the comma splice so much in dialogue, because dialogue in fiction is never a true representation of speech at the best of times, and the comma-splice kind of symbolises that. Put it this way: I’d rather see a comma-splice in dialogue than the semi-colon, because the semi-colon feels too formal for most fictional dialogue.

Some writers make much use of the comma splice and readers don’t mind. Maeve Binchy, case in point. I love her stories but the comma splice in some of her novels really gets my goat.

2. Overuse of the sentence fragment

Sentence fragments wear on the reader because we must fill out the rest of a sentence in our heads in order to make sense of it. Also, if a sentence has had its head lopped off, starting in middle, the reader has expected a different grammatical pattern to follow, and is often forced to mentally recast the syntax. Too many sentence fragments feel like a cheap way of finding some sort of literary, poetic voice.

3. The single-sentence paragraph

If you’re going to draw that much attention to a single sentence, it had better be a rip-snorter.

Unless you’re writing for the internet, in which case I’ll happily read your single sentence paragraphs because of the pleasing negative space.

4. Firstly, secondly, thirdly

I prefer first, second, third. No need to make these words sound more like adverbs. They’re fine as they are.

As  you were.

English I’ve Had Trouble With

disabuse

This word has nothing to do with abuse. It is not the opposite of abuse.

erstwhile

If I knew what an ‘erst’ was I might’ve been able to work out the meaning of this word without needing to look it up in a dictionary.

EVERY OTHER

This phrase is an Americanism to me. I say ‘every second’. ‘Every other’ doesn’t make sense at all. Every time I hear it I think, ‘How do you know which are the other ones?’ How?

LEFT AND RIGHT

I somehow learnt these back to front as a kid. I still have to think consciously each time I’m given instructions. My driving tests were a laugh a minute.

PANT

I know that pants (trousers) used to comprise two garments – one for each leg, and that they were put on separately – and I know there’s no need for us to keep the plural. I just can’t get used to the phrase ‘ladies pleat pant’ in clothing store catalogues.

PIECE DE RESISTANCE

Not a gun.

POTABLE

Does not mean simply that you can put it in a pot. You could put giardia ridden water in a pot too, technically. That wouldn’t make it potable.

REDOUBLE

I still haven’t worked out why we need this word ie. Why not just double your efforts? Redoubling sounds like quadrupling to me.

MILLENNIUM

Everyone knows how to spell it NOW that most of us were around for Y2K but who would’ve guessed it was spelt with two l’s as well as two n’s?

HARASSMENT

Yet this word is spelt with a single r and a double s. Unlike ‘embarrassment’, which took me an age to get right.

IMPECCABLE vs PECCABLE

The word ‘peccable‘ is actually a word and was originally the opposite of ‘impeccable’. But impeccable is no longer used as it was originally used. Well, not usually.

INTERLOCUTOR

I didn’t know this word until I learned Japanese, whose equivalent ‘aite’ is used frequently in everyday conversation. Interlocutor is a common word in linguistics, and I’d love to be able to use it without sounding pretentious because it’s easier than saying ‘the other person in a conversation’.

POO VS FAECES

In English there is no good word for shit. Poo sounds babyish, faeces sounds medical, shit is expletive. Other languages have an everyday, matter-of-fact word for it, and the few times I have had to use this word in a formal context (one stands out in my mind) I have blundered. I accidentally said ‘shit’ to my boss and, though he didn’t bat an eyelid, bless him, I’m sure he remembers that conversation as vividly as I do.

PATHOLOGY

The first time I had blood tests at the doctor’s, the doc told me to head down to ‘Bloods’. This was a big surgery, with doors leading off everywhere. I walked around looking for a sign that included the word ‘Blood’. Couldn’t find one. The secretary told me I needed ‘Pathology’. Until that moment I’d only noticed the word in the phrase ‘pathological liar’, and did not think the word would ever apply to me. (Pathology is also a horror film and an American Death Metal band, for anyone interested.)

SUICIDE

Certain religions consider suicide a sin, and the verb is therefore ‘to commit suicide’. What if you’re not religious? This is already a difficult subject, and what if you understand that suicide is a complex issue, often related to mental health issues? What to use for the verb? Lately, more and more people are using ‘to suicide’ as the verb, which suits me better. I’m not quite used to it yet, though. I also listened to a podcast recently which talked about ‘suicidality’ – the state of feeling suicidal. Another useful word, which may facilitate wider understanding of this issue.

MINUTIAE

Can’t spell it, can’t pronounce it. I use it anyway. Forgive me.

Oh, and here’s a ‘list of words every high school graduate should know‘. Hmph. Well, I’ve survived this far.