Month: January 2017

Adieu, Apostrophe!

apostrophe-flying

Maybe this is a strange thing for someone to say who spent as much time as I did learning to use apostrophes, but I won’t miss them when they’re gone. It seems clear to me that they will go. Like the hyphen, we’re quickly learning we can live without them; and texting, I think, will be the apostrophe’s death-blow.

I always found apostrophes a little equivocal anyway. The rule—as I learned it—was that an apostrophe had three functions: One was to indicate a dropped letter in a contraction of two words, as “don’t” for “do not”, for example; and “sha’n’t” for “shall not”, which—to be correct—actually requires two apostrophes. (So does “foc’s’le” for “forecastle”, even though “forecastle” isn’t actually a contraction of two words at all, but one word that sailors pronounce very badly.) A second use was to indicate possession (“Jack’s book”), although this rule was just a refinement of rule one, since “Jack’s book” was originally a contraction of “Jack, his book”—a usage that has been obsolete for so long that a lot of people don’t realize that it was ever the “correct” way, and “Jack’s” would get you points off on your English paper. To make the rule regular, “Mary, her book” would have to give us the form “Mary’r book”, which you’ll notice doesn’t exist.

The third use of an apostrophe was to pluralize individual letters, as in, “all the a’s and b’s”, which I still think is useful but I seem to be the only one who remembers it.

Do we need any of those? The extra apostrophes in “sha’n’t” and “foc’s’le” went the way of the Dodo and we still recognize those words when we see them—which in the case of “shan’t”, we hardly ever do anymore. As indicators of possession, apostrophes seem to cause more confusion than clarity. I’m so tired of seeing “it’s” used incorrectly (it can only be a contraction for “it is”), that I’d rather just never see that word with an apostrophe ever again. And “Jacks book” seems intelligible enough to me.

But anyway, love ’em or loath ’em, in twenty or thirty years I think apostrophes will be gone. In 1978 the Colorado State Legislature decreed that the only acceptable spelling of the name of the mountain is “Pikes Peak” without the apostrophe; and as goes Pikes Peak, so goes the nation. Remember that you heard it here first.

Age of Innocence?

sleeping-passengers-smaller

A few days ago I was telling a writer friend about a story I was working on, in which the protagonist was a child growing up in the 1920s—an era I characterized as more “innocent” than our own. My friend objected. People weren’t more innocent then, she asserted. They were just more hypocritical about pretending to be innocent. Neither of us had any data to support our positions, but I did offer this anecdote (which I did not include in my story, by the way).

In 1924, my maternal grandfather was employed by the railroad, and one of the perks of the job (it may have been the only perk) was that he got free rail passes. They were for travel anywhere in the US; but only for the “day-car,” meaning seats, not berths, and they didn’t cover food, of course. But unlike most married women of her day, my grandmother had a part-time job. She supervised a team of women—mostly housewives like herself—who supplied fancy-work to order for Marshall Field’s department store. My grandmother spent the money she got for teaching the women to make beaded purses and embroidered baby layettes to bankroll a family trip to relatives in California.

Even with rail passes and my grandmother’s savings, the five-day journey was an extravagance, and economies had to be made. My grandmother packed a basket with enough food to last the first two days (the diner, my mother always remembered, charged the shocking price of ten cents for a single boiled egg in the days when a dozen eggs cost twelve cents at the grocery store). For the first night, my grandparents and my mother’s baby sister shared a berth (it must have been snug), while my mother and her older sister were supposed to sleep stretched out on seats in the day-car. (On subsequent nights the family would be able to afford two berths, because one day out of Chicago, ridership on the train diminished, and the price went down.)

The train left Chicago at dinnertime, and at ten o’clock the family went to bed. The day-car was still fairly crowded, but luckily my mother and her sister each got a seat to herself—though not, as they had anticipated, facing one another. Instead, my mother was on one side of the aisle, and my aunt on the other.

And on the seat facing my aunt was a man. He was already asleep, with his arms folded and his hat pulled over his face.

Next morning at breakfast, my aunt looked terrible. Eyes ringed with blue, she could hardly hold her head up. When my grandmother questioned her, she admitted, shamefaced, that she hadn’t gotten a wink the night before; but wouldn’t say why until her mother—probably fearing the worst—took her aside. In private, it all came out: The man in the seat opposite had slept soundly, never stirring—but the only “fact of life” my aunt knew was that if a girl slept with a man, she might have a baby. My aunt was eleven years old.

My writer friend and I eventually compromised on our positions: She agreed that there was a time in human history when the so-called “innocence” of young people was more “protected,” and I conceded that this era was very short (the approximately one hundred years or so between the time when ubiquitous barnyards ensured that the means of mammalian reproduction was on regular display, and the time when popular media took over that function).

On the other hand, we weren’t able agree on whether this kind of “protection” was a good thing or not. My friend did find the story hilarious, however. She said I should use it some time.

So now I have.

Image by Charles O’Rear, 1941-, Photographer (NARA record: 3403717) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Have a Little Respect (for your readers)

caravan

Long ago, just at the time that I was nervously considering submitting my first work for publication, I happened to come across an article (in a magazine I respected), called something like, “My Life as an American Gypsy.”* I was interested. Growing up, I’d seen groups of Roma sheepherders near where I lived (in the days before RVs became standard, they’d adopted large Cadillacs in place of their traditional caravans), and I was curious about their lives.

The piece was purportedly written by a contemporary Romani-American woman, but when I read it I discovered (to my annoyance) that it was nothing more than a slightly reworked series of incidents lifted straight out of Jan Yoors’ memoir of his life with the Lovari Romani in 1930s Europe. My annoyance stemmed from the fact that Yoors’ The Gypsies (I highly recommend it) is a standard work on the subject, and not only I, but lots of people, have read it. I felt totally dissed by the assumption that I wouldn’t know the work.

I was insulted—but I learned a good lesson. Readers read. Some of them—like me—read a lot. With this in mind, I never ever directly recycle anything I read into something I intend to share.

Other people’s personal experiences are great source material, though. I’ve praised family stories for this before, and I’ll say it again: If you listen carefully, Granny’s got some good stuff there. And if you look around, Granny’s granny—or at least, somebody’s granny—probably kept a diary or wrote a memoir way back whenever. Whatever historical period you want to write about—and without borrowing any one specific incident—you can mine primary sources for all sorts of period detail.

Project Gutenberg is my new favorite source for historical tidbits. For instance, I’d never considered the inconvenience—even danger—that colonial New Englanders subjected themselves to by observing European fashions in a rough new country with lots of snow and not many Old Country conveniences until I read Anna Green Winslow’s account of how a broken axle one Sunday forced knee-breeched and daintily shod neighbors (no trousers or boots at church, please) to abandon their carriage and struggle in silk stockings through three feet of snow. Keeping in mind all those voracious readers I mentioned, I’d never plagiarize Miss Winslow; but I could easily come up with a story of my own in which it’s a significant point that, in Ye Good Olde Dayes, there was no Gore-Tex. Anna Green Winslow’s Diary, written in 1771 and first published in 1894, is a treasure-trove of all kinds of historical material, in fact; and it’s free to download.

Another good one—which in my opinion ought to be required reading in American schools—is Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, which pretty much knocks the stuffing out of Gone with the Wind-type ante-bellum fantasies of the Old South. This one was a forehead-slapper for me. The reality of plantation life becomes obvious when you keep in mind that plantations were intended to be money-making (preferably, lots of money), and not humanitarian-or even humane-endeavors. Again; the book’s free, convenient to get, and contains information not only about ante-bellum America, but also things like women’s issues. Ms Kemble left her husband, but spent years afterward feverishly placating him so that he would refrain from invoking his paternal right to take their children away from her.

And then there are the periodicals…

Ah, nothing like a good Victorian periodical to remind us that it isn’t just tight stays that can constrict women.  One year of “Godey’s Ladys Book” is packed with enough articles written by male clergymen about a woman’s duty to shut her mouth and please her menfolk to precipitate clinical depression in any normal female.

On the other hand, “The Prairie Farmer”, full of no-nonsense articles written by farm-wives to advise other farm-wives on how to increase cash-flow in the butter-and-egg sectors happily makes it clear that, whatever the folks at “Godey’s” thought, a lot of women were getting right out there and making something more than household ornaments of themselves. And with the full support of their men-folk, too.

All of which makes me wonder why would anyone plagiarize one book (and risk offending the subset of their readers already familiar with it) when right at hand are a thousand good sources of material on every subject. –Of course, I admit it’s really easy to get so interested in reading those thousand sources that you have no time to write at all. That can be a problem. It’s certainly mine.

*I should point out that this was in the days when “gypsy” was the accepted name for people who now prefer to be called “Roma” or “Romani”, and I certainly intend no offense by using it.

Why I Don’t Write Novels about Scientists—and Why, If You Knew Them, You Probably Wouldn’t Either

doc-brown

People who know me are sometimes surprised that I don’t write about scientists. “A scientist would make a great character,” they tell me. “People are interested in scientists; they’re colorful; and you know all about them.”

Even without asking, I know the people who say this all really enjoyed the Back to the Future movies.

Heck, I enjoyed them myself; and the character of Dr. Emmett Brown did, in certain key ways, actually resemble some scientists I have known. Just dial Dr. Brown’s eccentricity and flamboyance waaaaaay back, preserve (or enhance) his single-mindedness and drive, increase the Brown family fortune that he spent up doing his research to at least twenty million dollars* (it took him—what? thirty years?—and doing research is very expensive), then load him up with a lot of teaching duties and administrative responsibilities and the fictional inventor of the time-traveling DeLorean would make a perfectly plausible researcher.

But—and this is the critical part—not a very good character in a movie, or book.

While it is true that a lot of scientists are a bit eccentric (some quite charmingly so), to be successful they have a lot of other traits that are the opposite of colorful. Doing research, as I mentioned, is expensive and most real scientists don’t have a family fortune to spend. Therefore, they must secure grants, which requires, not flamboyance, but an organized and linear thinker who can marshal past research successes, the present research status, and a coherent three-to-five-year plan for advancing the field into a forty-page document that will convince a panel of competing researchers and at least one cold-hearted government agency that any large chunks of money they throw his way will be well spent. I’ve known researchers who sported flying hair and flapping lab-coats à la Dr. Emmett Brown, and even ones who, like Einstein, eschewed socks. But believe me, when it comes to getting funding, they are as practical and business-like as any CEO, and just as uptight.

And then, if Dr. Brown is a scientist, then why isn’t Marty McFly more educated about time travel? Hang around scientists for long (five minutes) and what you find is that they can’t stop talking about what they do. They’re used to talking about their research, because that’s a huge part of their job; and since they mostly talk to other researchers who find what they say riveting, they’re used to thinking that everyone wants to hear all about it. Scientists teach everybody, all the time. Even scientists in research institutions who have no classes to teach still have to educate their graduate students and post-doctoral fellows; the public (funding again!); and—through seminars and symposia—their peers. Marty was Dr. Brown’s friend and didn’t know about the flux capacitor???? He’d have heard all about the flux capacitor nine million times!

In my experience your average scientist, far from being a wild-eyed loony, is much too serious, driven, single-minded, analytic, practical, deeply but not widely knowledgeable (there are exceptions), and naturally skeptical for me to want to write about.

Also—and this may be the real reason they don’t come up in my novels—despite all this practicality, etc. etc., an incredible number of them love the Three Stooges. I just don’t think my writing skills are up to making that seem believable.

*Question: Are we supposed to deduce that Dr. Brown burned down the family mansion to get the insurance on it to fund his research? Because this has been suggested to me by several people in a “duh! Of course he did” tone of voice when I totally did not see that at all. Not that don’t believe that there are real scientists—a few—who might do this if all their other funding sources ran out; I just didn’t see it.

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