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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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 | 
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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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7 Comments | books, literature, poetry, wordplay | Tagged: 000000, book spine poem, book spine poetry, bookmash, books, Carl Jung, Deirdre Madden, Djuna Barnes, Don DeLillo, ffffff, found poetry, Hilary Mantel, Kate Mikhail, literature, Nick Harkaway, Paul Brickhill, Pauline Kael, poetry, Raymond Chandler, Richard Davenport-Hines, Ursula K. Le Guin, visual poetry, wordplay | Permalink
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
November 8, 2023
I was reading Richard Stark’s crime novel Flashfire when the following line took me down an etymological side street:
He approached the hospital catty-corner, through the parking lots.
I’d come across the phrase catty-corner before, but not often, and only in novels, as far as I can recall. It’s not part of Irish English.
At first I visualized Parker, the protagonist, walking towards the building along the walls or edges, as cats often do. But catty-corner, as you may well know, means ‘diagonally’, and it has nothing to do with cats – at least not originally.
The adverb (and adjective) has a plethora of variant spellings that include catty-corner(ed), cater-corner(ed), cata-corner(ed), and kitty-corner(ed), with and without an -ed or a hyphen. How these phrases are pronounced is correspondingly mixed – but their geographical distribution follows a pattern, at least in the continental US: mostly catty-corner in the South, across to Texas, kitty-corner elsewhere.*
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8 Comments | etymology, language, language history, phrases, spelling, words | Tagged: 000000, cats, compounding, compounds, dialect, etymology, ffffff, folk etymology, language, language history, phrases, Richard Stark, spelling, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
February 27, 2023
Sometimes what I read tells me what to write about. Other times the hints come from what I watch. This time it’s both. First I read a line in Richard Pryor’s autobiography Pryor Convictions with this mighty stack of intensifying negatives:
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47 Comments | dialect, grammar, language, language history, linguistics, pragmatics, speech, syntax, usage, writing | Tagged: 000000, 1, 2, ambiguity, descriptivism, dialect, double negatives, ffffff, grammar, language, language history, language myths, linguistics, misnegation, multiple negation, negation, negative concord, Otto Jespersen, politics of language, pragmatics, prescriptivism, Richard Pryor, sociolinguistics, speech, standardized English, syntax, usage, usage myths, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
March 25, 2022
On a recent rewatch of the 1979 film The Warriors, I noticed an unusual pronoun spoken by Cleon, played by Dorsey Wright:*
Ourself, once in regular use, is now scarce outside of certain dialects, and many (maybe most) people would question its validity. I’ve seen it followed by a cautious editorial [sic] even in linguistic contexts. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), describing it as the reflexive form of singular we – ‘an honorific pronoun used by monarchs, popes, and the like’ – says it is ‘hardly current’ in present-day English.
But that’s not the whole story, and it belies the word’s surprising versatility and stubborn survival outside of mainstream Englishes, which this post will outline. There are graphs and data further down, but let’s start with usage.
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Posted by Stan Carey
December 6, 2014
I won’t subject readers to another long, rambling post on whom. But I want to note the tendency, strongest among those who are anxious to use whom “correctly”, to use it even when who would be generally considered the grammatically appropriate choice: as subject pronoun.
Ben Zimmer at Language Log recently criticised a book review at the New Yorker in which Nathan Heller wrote: “The glorious thing about the ‘who’ and ‘whom’ distinction is that it’s simple.” This is an easy assumption to make if your grasp of who/whom grammar owes to the oversimplified instructions of the many prescriptive guides that neglect to examine register or the trickier possible cases.*
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Posted by Stan Carey
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.
Sentence first 