February 2, 2026
In Doris Lessing’s story ‘A Road to the Big City’, published in her 1957 collection The Habit of Loving (my Penguin paperback edition, pictured, is from 1960), two young women, sisters, are travelling by train in Johannesburg.
Marie, the younger, and Lilla sit at a table with a middle-aged man and allow him to buy them drinks. Lilla, who considers her sister unworldly, chooses brandy for them both. It’s Marie’s first time drinking it.
The three get to talking about their plans and backgrounds:
‘Mom is old-fashioned,’ said Marie. She said the word old-fashioned carefully; it was not hers, but Lilla’s; she was tasting it, in the way she sipped at the brandy, trying it out, determined to like it.
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books, language, literature, metaphor, reading, words, writing | Tagged: books, brandy, Doris Lessing, drink, food, language, literature, metaphor, reading, short stories, words, writing | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
December 22, 2024
Books, especially novels, often quote song lyrics – typically as an epigraph and sometimes in the body text. If, that is, the author or publisher can afford it. But what of novels that quote songs accidentally, or ‘accidentally’? This is the kind of thing I mean, in Joe R. Lansdale’s A Fine Dark Line:
‘I know,’ Buster said. ‘I heard it through the grapevine. Ain’t nothin’ happens in this town, or the Section, gets by them birds on that porch over by my house. . . .’
The line I heard it through the grapevine predates its use in Motown records, grapevine being a metaphor for the telegram since the 19th century. But you try seeing it written down and not instantly hearing it in the voice of Marvin Gaye:
Or Gladys Knight and the Pips, or Creedence Clearwater Revival, et cetera. Another example, with a song that’s less well known, occurs in Lee Child and Andrew Child’s No Plan B:
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7 Comments | books, literature, music, reading, writing | Tagged: Andrew Child, books, Jim Croce, Joe R Lansdale, Lee Child, literature, music, reading, song lyrics, songs, Stephen King, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
October 16, 2024
Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction has a lot of interesting material on language use and politics. Well, it has interesting material on all sorts of things, but this is a blog about language, so I’m being selective.
The book was first published in 1979, edited and introduced by Susan Wood; my paperback copy, pictured, is the revised 1989 edition from the Women’s Press, edited by Le Guin.
In ‘Dreams Must Explain Themselves’ (1973), Le Guin touches on the reference works that she consults for her writing (I’m a copy-editor: you can bet my attention spiked at this point), and adds a later note elaborating on the subject. Those works are strikingly, deliberately few:
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6 Comments | books, gender, language, literature, reading, writers, writing | Tagged: 000000, dictionaries, fantasy, ffffff, gender, gender-neutral language, language and gender, literature, OED, personal pronouns, plain English, plain language, politics of language, politics of usage, pronouns, reference, rewriting, science fiction, SFF, style, The Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin, usage, writers, writing, writing style | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
September 30, 2024
My last book spine poem was made last winter, on a seasonal theme.* With autumn slipping in and the evenings becoming short here in Ireland, a new book spine poem (aka bookmash) suggested itself.
*
Sleep the Big Sleep
When the lights go down
One by one in the darkness,
Teach yourself to
Sleep the big sleep,
The great escape,
The pursuit of oblivion –
Dreams, nightwood,
White noise beyond black –
The language of the night,
The gone-away world.
*
*
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Posted by Stan Carey
August 16, 2024
I was sad to hear that Edna O’Brien had died. She lived a remarkable life and leaves an amazing body of work: she was, in Eimear McBride’s description, ‘one of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature’.
The controversy over O’Brien’s taboo-breaking early books – starting with The Country Girls (1960), which was banned in Ireland – had ebbed by the time I started reading her, but the elegance of her writing and the power of her stories remained, and remains, undiminished.
Recently, revisiting her short story ‘Madame Cassandra’, which was published in the 1968 collection The Love Object and again in 2011’s Saints and Sinners, a rare word in its opening paragraph caught my eye:
I always love the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the coolth and the nectar.
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17 Comments | etymology, language, language history, literature, words | Tagged: 000000, affixes, coolth, Edna O'Brien, etymology, ffffff, irish literature, language, language corpora, language history, literature, morphology, OED, rare words, Seamus Heaney, semantics, suffixes, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
January 9, 2024
Lorrie Moore’s 2009 novel A Gate at the Stairs offers among its attractions several passages and exchanges of lexical and linguistic interest. This post looks at some of them.
The book’s narrator, Tassie, is a Midwestern farm girl now in college. She’s also employed as a nanny by Sarah, a restaurateur. One of their early conversations has commentary on the semantic inflation of awesome:
“You have a mother?” I said. “I mean, your mother’s alive?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Awesome,” I said, in that peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding that everything either “sucked” or was “awesome.” We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.
The word’s vexed usage gets another mention later, when Sarah gives Tassie a sweet delicacy to taste:
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2 Comments | books, language, literature, words, writing | Tagged: A Gate at the Stairs, American literature, awesome, books, dialect, grammar, grammatical tense, language, laughter, literature, Lorrie Moore, prepositions, quasi, usage, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
December 8, 2023
A new book spine poem, for the season that’s in it.
*
Wintering
When things fall apart,
Leave the world behind:
Lurking underworld,
Wintering underland,
The beginning of spring,
The will to change
Almost there.
*
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9 Comments | books, literature, poetry, wordplay | Tagged: bell hooks, book spine poem, bookmash, books, Don DeLillo, found poetry, Joanne McNeil, Katherine May, literature, Nuala Ó Faoláin, Pema Chödrön, Penelope Fitzgerald, poetry, Robert Macfarlane, Rumaan Alam, visual poetry, wordplay | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
In Doris Lessing’s story ‘A Road to the Big City’, published in her 1957 collection The Habit of Loving (my Penguin paperback edition, pictured, is from 1960), two young women, sisters, are travelling by train in Johannesburg.
Sentence first 