'Tis a Word Affliction

I have found that lately when I sit at the keyboard, my fingers do a little dance that goes something like this:

Plunk, plunk, plunk, stutter, stop. Plunk, stop. Plunk, backspace, delete...stutter..plunk...plunk.

These faltering keystrokes lurch their way across the blank screen to create a literary flea market all abuzz and abrim with $5 bargain sentences and $1 words. I think I keep hoping I will find something of value hidden behind the squiggles and between the lines of that glorious mess.

Alas. Writer's block has afflicted me for far too long. So, I am setting forth a task to challenge myself-six stories in six weeks.

"Gobbledygook"

Dear Word Detective:

In a recent column you used the word "gobbledygook." Where do we get that odd sounding word? -- Harry, via the Internet.

It all started with a 19th century Texas cattleman named Samuel Maverick who became famous for not branding his cattle. His cattle, left unidentified and free to roam, were often "adopted" by other ranchers who termed them "mavericks," and by the end of the century "maverick" had come to mean any sort of rootless wanderer or rebel.

About 100 years later, Sam Maverick's grandson, Maury Maverick, was serving in the U.S. House of Representatives during World War II. Charged with overseeing factory production for the war effort, Rep. Maverick coined the term "gobbledygook" to describe the impenetrable bureaucratic jargon and doubletalk he encountered. He later explained that he based the word on the behavior of turkeys back in Texas, who were "... always gobbledygobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity. At the end of this gobble there was a sort of gook."

Rep.Maverick went on to issue a memorable edict stating that "Anyone using the words 'activation' or 'implementation' will be shot." Sadly, no bureaucrat was ever actually shot, and unfortunately "governmentese" is still going strong, but it certainly seems fitting that Sam Maverick's grandson would be the "maverick" who fired the first shot against "gobbledygook."

Random discipline

I am a painful Picasso when it comes to writing poetry. My "blue period" included such titles as Bad Burton and Chasing Butterflies. My abuse of rhyme and meter should have been tried as criminal.

“call it fate, but I thought it seemed right,
to see a butterfly there in the morning light…”

Bad poetry aside, I try to write a little bit every day. Sometimes I publish it here, and sometimes I do not. I don’t know what this ritual accomplishes other than to discipline my brain to convert thoughts to words through my fingers.

So here goes random discipline:

Every few days I am stirred by something that happens in the universe. Usually it is subtle—the way something looks or smells and releases a fragment of memory or a phrase that marches out of context through my head until I recognize that it needs to be heard.

I saw a "house-biter" destroying a little house to make way for a mansion. The jaws clamped over the roof and crumbled the walls that once held the hopes and sorrows of a family. And, I wrote and wrote and wrote about the old giving way to the new. The cycles of life.

Sausage McMuffins inspired another piece about my mother watching me eat the popular breakfast sandwich and remarking: "I am glad you can enjoy swine's flesh." It prompted me to remember the Hebrew dietary laws that governed the food on the table of childhood even though we were not Jewish. And, the oh, so funny story of how a friend of ours, who discovered that he and his sister were eating bacon, yelled "Spit it out Lisa! It's pig meat."

Once I wrote a whole short story based on the phrase: "It was a road that would have been better left untraveled." Of course, I found out in short order that my spell check didn't think that UNTRAVELED is a word. It wanted me to use the word UNRAVELED. And, unraveled might also have been an appropriate use.

It was a road better left unraveled, but I didn’t know that until I was half way down it.

The road less raveled. The road less graveled. The road less traveled.

Writing. I do love words and good writing. I don’t know how to tell you what good writing is, but I know it when I read it. It is not cluttery. It doesn’t have too many images. And, it should make me see and feel what is beneath the words.

I have come to favor incomplete sentences when used for emphasis. I rather like the idea of breaking the traditional rules of writing. I still feel rebellious when I start a sentence with AND or BUT. I follow the AP stylebook's rules for commas. Writing should just flow and the need for a comma will be apparent. I like a metaphor that adds to my understanding. A metaphor that sits in the middle of the page clipping its literary toenails...well...it isn't so useful.

There is nothing disciplined about this writing and it took me less than five minutes. Will I use this? No. Maybe. Okay. I will.

FWD: "Deviant" Septum

We all get them. Those dreaded e-mail forwards with miles and miles of address headers. With instructions to "Scroll down. No, scroll down further, idiot." All underscored by dire warnings for you and your household and all generations to come if you are foolish enough to ignore them.

As a general rule, I hate these internet intruders. Delete them unread. Scold the friends who send them. But, once in a while I am tempted to click one open. I am a word whore after all.

Remember this one? English is a crazy language...

In what other language do...

• ... people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway?
• ... people play at a recital and recite at a play?

And why...

• ... does night fall but never break and day break but never fall?
• ... is it that when we transport something by car, it's called a shipment, but when we transport something by ship, it's called cargo?

I have always marveled that someone took the time to think about such things and put them in a list to be circulated throughout the reaches of the world wide web. I guess I figured it must be someone who had far more time and far less responsibility than I did. It never occurred to me that the material might have been "lifted" from a reliable source.

Last week during a forage through a favorite used bookstore, I found a thin, yellow paperback written by Richard Lederer. Anguished English, An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon our Language. It is a collection of modern day malapropisms, mangled modifiers, misspellings and mixed up metaphors. I think material from this book and the 30 others he has written may have spawned the electronic multitude of English language missives that march madly through my mailbox.

I read a couple pages every night, and smile myself to sleep.

A few excerpts :

"I have a deviant septum." and "You're in for a shrewd awakening."

"Yoko Ono will talk about her husband, John Lennon, who was killed in an interview with Barbara Walters."

"Running is a unique experience. I thank God for exposing me to the track team."

If you like words at all, I would advise you to find this book. Read it. Paste it to your forehead. If you quote it, don't forget to attribute the fine collection to Richard Lederer. And above all, DO NOT forward it to me.

Find a good thing

"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over the head, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

(I wish I could attribute this quote, but I can't seem to find a reliable source.)

So, I was thinking about words...

Mark Twain once said, "When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear."

With all the words available in the English language, it is a sad lack of imagination that relies on common four-letter words to spank the offending party. There is nothing like the overused F word to reveal a withered IQ.

The other day my children, who are angels, were in a heated dispute. The best they could come up with was "you are such a bitch." It pained me, but not in the usual way. How could my offspring, conceived on a bed of lexicons, have become so atrophied that they couldn't rain all the demons of the English language upon each others heads?

I remember when Jayna could take someone off at the knees with "subbarena" and "sandbagger." These were her word daggers. The only swear word she knew was "shut up." Jared was slow in language acquisition, but I knew he caught up when he likened someone to "a worm without any eyes." He was four. (I personally haven't seen a worm WITH eyes, but that is beside the point.)

When we were growing up, Charlie and I would tell our younger sister that we found her in a frog swamp. I think we heard a shtick like that and applied it to Janelle with glee. We would chant, "adopted, adopted" whenever we felt she needed to be put in her place. That one word, selected with intent...

The power of life and death are in the tongue (or pen.) The words we choose choke the spirit or set it free. He who finds a word, finds a good thing.