Logophily

Logophily

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Linguistic shenanigans & writing tidbits

–by Joel Patton

Distressions [1] & Digressions [2]

 15_distressions

The other day [3], I passed a housepainter’s van. It advertised a variety of services, including the first part of the title of this essay: distressions [4].

I immediately knew the meaning of the word, though I’d never seen or heard it used before, because of an acquaintance’s work experience, to wit [5]:

Said acquaintance worked part-time for a cabinetmaker. My friend can’t carpent [6], but he didn’t need to. His employer and his regular employees would build brand-new $40,000 banks of kitchen cabinets, and my friend, armed with awls [7], rusty chains [8], sandpaper [9], and the like, would make them look like hundred-year-old $40,000 banks of kitchen cabinets. Continue reading →

Logophily: Dreams & Writer’s Block

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linguistic shenanigans and writing tidbits

~by Joel Patton

***

OK, I’m gonna write about a dream [1].

If you want to skip to the part where I give suggestions to combat writer’s block, I understand. There’s some majuscule text below… head down to that section.

So, the dream: someone called me up, and asked me to contribute sixteen bars [2] to some sort of side project [3].

We had a meeting, and I was nervous. I couldn’t come up with a single couplet [4]. He told me wander off for a half-hour, come up with at least a rough outline, and report back.

I sat at a table in the sort of place one dreams about sitting [5], and I tried to write. Nothing. Meanwhile, two members of the group [6] were playfully and effortlessly freestyling nearby. I reported back to my contact, who was disappointed in a stern, nothing-at-stake-for-him sort of way.

I woke up and was mildly exasperated: while I’d been trying to force my brain to create loosely structured verse, my brain created two entire dudes effortlessly spouting two separate but intertwined sets of loosely structured verse [7].

OK, SKIP TO THIS PART DOWN HERE.

What’s the moral lesson here? Per usual, I don’t know. But I won’t let that stop me from suggesting things.

It’s easier to escape from writer’s block if the pressure is off. There’s no insight there, but keep going [8].

The fact that I was (unconsciously, in this case) using personae freed things up, too: Joel-as-Joel [9] couldn’t come up with anything, but Joel-as-two-established-rappers [10] could.

Composition for them felt effortless, as though it was taking place in a different part of my brain [11], so maybe there are different ways to take advantage of that, too.

I don’t actually remember the verses they (which is to say, I) came up with, but I bet that however good they sounded at the time, they were in fact abysmal [12].

Or they might have been plagiarized. I don’t recommend outright copying and interpolation as a technique for writing something publishable [13], but lifting plots or repurposing details is more or less essential. It’s what both dreams and literature consist of. The standard dream example is the impossible hybrid public building mashup [14]. As far as literary examples go, here’s a sort of cliché one: Shakespeare didn’t come up with the original story for Troilus and Cressida… he cribbed from Chaucer, who’d cribbed from Boccacio. Another classic literary example is the general design of the Millennium Falcon, which George Lucas demonstrated to designers by placing an olive to next to a hamburger.

The thing that seems to help the most is allowing failure to be an option. That’s not always possible, I know. And not everyone would appreciate the sort of wabi-sabi quality that I generally advocate for [15]. But if you have both the problem I started with and the luxuries I’ve mentioned at the end, the resulting mess might be compelling.

MANTISSAE.

1. Remember that creative writing instructors hate that shit: https://pankmagazine.com/2012/07/10/dreams-creative-writing-instructors-hate-that-shit/

2. Which is to say, a full rap verse. I’m a dilettante, but this would be a career stretch.

3. The sort of side project that is invariably terrible. I made a mental note of this in-dream. I suppose that all dream notes are by definition mental notes, but then all notes are mental notes, if we’re getting all philosophical and shit.

4. Not even a set of words. and I can almost always do that. Here, have some: oubliette / googly jet.

5. The nighttime sort of dream table rather than the daydream sort of dream table, sadly.

6. 22.22222% of the crew.

7. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m sure that the things they were saying were in fact really dumb. But at least I was extemporizing something that scanned.

8. There’s none later, either.

9. Looks as though someone’s got a new rap name!

10. Looks as though someone’s got two new rap names! Or three, I guess maybe.

11. The phrase “a different part of the brain” is effectively meaningless in a literal sense, but it’s a handy metaphor.

12. Writing in and about dreams typically is.

13. Or at all, unless you’re capable of excising the stolen bits entirely, or using them as acknowledged pastiche.

14. Followed by the morning standard rambling explanation of the ways in which it was the one place but then also the other place but really (&c).

15. It’s also possible that I’m just kinda sloppy.

***

Joel Patton is a potter in Travelers Rest, SC.

Logophily: More Birds

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linguistic shenanigans and writing tidbits

~by Joel Patton

***
Crow[1]. Merle[2]. Gull [3]. Raven [4].
Raptor [5].
Falcon and tercel [6].
Parrot. Parakeet [7].
Hawk [8]. Kite [9]. Shrike [10].
Jay [11]. Swallow [12]. Starling [13].
Woodpecker. Sandlapper [14]. Plover [15].
Wing. Feather. Pinion [16].
Buzzard [17]. Gizzard [18]. Crop [19].
Vulture [20]. Stork [21].
Avian. Ornitho- [22]. All the way back to bird [23]. Continue reading →

Logophily: Spelling Reform

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linguistic shenanigans and writing tidbits

~by Joel Patton

 

alphabet

English pronunciation surely requires a doughty constitution [1]. Imagine for a moment a world in which English spelling followed simple, logical rules, such that even a nonspeaker could tell at a glance how a word is pronounced.

And keep imagining it, because that shit will not happen.

Here are a few reasons why:

As with the QWERTY keyboard, we’re stuck with an odd system for historical reasons.  It would be hard to fix things now, even if we could all agree on a solution [2] [3]. There are a few historical reasons for these insane and nonsensical variations of pronunciation and spelling.  English spellings were standardized centrally, by late-medieval bureaucrats, more or less by fiat [4].  The influence of French, which has fourteen different ways of spelling no sound at all at the end of a word [5], has continued nearly a thousand years past the Battle of Hastings.  At some point, English stopped anglicizing the spellings of foreign words [6].  The Great Vowel Shift happened [7]. Continue reading →

Logophily: Editing + Knowledge, part 2

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Please join me as I continue my fascinating journey through someone’s shopping list:

Flour=flower, jerks. Don’t believe me? Good. That sort of skepticism is important, particularly for to this sort of linguistic phenomenon. The general rule is that if something sounds likely, it’s not true. But in this case, it’s true: what we call flour was originally the best part -the flower- of the wheat meal. I’d be interested to know why the spelling difference was codified. . . maybe an early phenomenon like lede in the newspaper business [1].

Eggo waffles / syrup go together like sweet potatoes / marshmellows. The latter two items go together in sweet potato casserole, in which recipe sweet potatoes are boiled (possibly before they were canned), mashed with stuff (most importantly butter), topped with marshmallows [2], and baked. It’s the one southern foodstuff I can think of that fits in with what I generally think of as Midwestern oddities, generally grouped under the rubric of salad: things that should be dessert [3], but which are just sitting there with the rest of lunch or dinner [4]. Continue reading →

Logophily: Editing + Knowledge

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On Christmas Eve, per usual, we went to eat dinner with family. We were supposed to bring drinks, but nobody told us.

I headed back to the closest grocery store to buy some sweet tea and soft drinks [1]. And while I was there, I found the shopping list pictured above [2].

I’m important to note that I’m not making fun of the writer of this list. The misspellings are common. Pedantry is worse than ignorance. Stop being dicks about grammar and spelling and punctuation. Continue reading →

Logophily: More Birds

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Crow[1]. Merle[2]. Gull [3]. Raven [4].

Raptor [5].

Falcon and tercel [6].

Parrot. Parakeet [7].

Hawk [8]. Kite [9]. Shrike [10].

Jay [11]. Swallow [12]. Starling [13].

Woodpecker. Sandlapper [14]. Plover [15].

Wing. Feather. Pinion [16].

Buzzard [17]. Gizzard [18]. Crop [19].

Vulture [20]. Stork [21].

Avian. Ornitho- [22]. All the way back to bird [23].

 

Mantissae:

1.Crow is an old Germanic word. . . it seems to go back to crow in the sense of cry out.

2. Blackbird in French. (Not black bird, but the specific type of black bird that is a blackbird.) There are related dialect and obsolete words in English.

3. From a Celtic word meaning weep — that’s two raucous birds named after the fact that they’re raucous. More will follow. Continue reading →

Logophily: What’s a Writer?

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What is a writer?

I’ll reformulate the question a couple of times [1]. Here’s one of them:

How can one tell if someone is a writer?

It’s really easy in the case of professional writers: they write; they get paid [2]. They’ve got an output, and there’s the added ethos of gettin’ money to do something. People who’ve authored canonical works and then not much else seem to get a pass, but maybe that’s the case for all creative professions [3] (and for Mafiosi).

But things get sticky after that [4].

There are lots of reasons to write — lots of exigences, lots of audiences, lots of purposes. The idea of writing, or at least of being an author, is still magical, even now that damn near everybody [5] writes all the damn time [6]. I used to teach various writing classes [7]. In the freshman comp class I taught, the first assignment went as follows: describe a literacy event in your life. It’s a vague assignment [8], but that vagueness was productive. . . students could talk about writing something or reading something. Anything.

Almost all of the students talked about writing, rather than reading. (The tendency was interesting, but probably had to do with the fact that the class was a composition class, in combination with the aforementioned vagueness in the assignment [9]). Many students talked about creative writing that they’d done, usually for their own amusement or by way of therapy, but a lot of those student writers expressed dreams of someday being professional writers.

The idea of someone just writing things for a living appeals (among other things) to a rockstar desire in some people, I imagine. It’s nice to have people appreciate what one writes [10]. I imagine it’d be nice to have groupies [11].

But the fact that lots of people want to write professionally doesn’t really answer my question about what constitutes a possibly non-professional writer. Continue reading →