On the non-existence of words

“Mummy,” I asked, “what does temerity mean?”

I presume she told me. I don’t remember the definition she gave.

"So, can you be temerous?” I was an inquisitive child.

Again, I can’t quote the answer, but the summary was that no, temerous was not a word. I was dispatched to consult the dictionary[*].

I was outraged. How could temerous not be a word? I could say it, I could define it, it was an obvious companion to temerity. This was clearly an administrative failure by the custodians of language. An oversight. Who were these people responsible for writing dictionaries, were they too timorous to include all the words that were? Timority, there was another missing word.

I searched language, and found it full of holes. Why was there no aidful?

My mother, growing weary of the unanswerable, told me that the word I wanted as helpful.

No, it was not. Helpful belonged to help. Where was the appropriate word for aid? Why had no one noticed that there were words missing, and who should I write to to get the error rectified?

It took me a long time to get over this particular wrinkle in the universe.

These days, I’ve moved on. If I can use it, and you know what I mean by it, then it damn well is a word. I’m just that temerous.

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[*] The Concise Oxford, which did indeed not contain it. These days I own a Compact Oxford, which is ironically much bigger and full of delightfully arcane nonsense. It absolutely has an entry for temerous.

Drabble-Writing for Fun

This week, inspired by the Drabble Harvest contest, I have been writing drabbles. This isn’t something I’ve tried to do before.

What’s a Drabble?

If you’ve not heard of a drabble, it’s defined as a story of exactly one hundred words. According to Wikipedia, the form originated with Birmingham University’s SF society in the 80s, and takes its name from Monty Python. It does not, as I’d previously assumed, appear to have anything to do with Margaret Drabble.

Some definitions also restrict the title to no more than fifteen words. I suspect this is because people were trying to hide extra story in the title!

(Completely irrelevantly: yes, I do often phrase my sub-headings in blog posts as questions, purely because I enjoy the deranged way this font renders question marks. Thank you for asking.)

How NOT TO Write a Drabble

A someone who has only just begun to experiment with the form, I’m clearly no expert. However, initial attempts have led me towards a very definite conclusion:

The trick is not to try to write a one-hundred-word story.

One hundred words is absolutely nothing - this blog post was well over the word-count before it even reached the end of its third paragraph. If you plan to fit a story into such a tiny space, then you will end up with… well, basically no story. You might get a vignette, or a very basic outline, but it’s likely to end up the fiction equivalent of the one-liner.

If I aim small, I find myself at 90 words, wondering where I can shoe-horn in extra adjectives to make up the numbers. And a drabble can’t really afford to waste its time on flabby descriptives. A few well-chosen details can really help set the scene, and avoid the “rushed” feeling you get from including only the bones. But if I’m looking to pad my work out to the required length, then I’m really not making the most of the space available.

Instead, the method that’s been working best for me is to settle down and write a story. A short one, sure, but without paying too much attention to the word-count. Once I’m happy with the story, I start removing pieces. How many sentences, or even paragraphs, can I actually take out without the whole thing collapsing? It’s not unlike a sort of literary KerPlunk.

I wrote some time ago about exposition, in particular about writing as much of it as seemed to want to be written, then removing most of it later. All those extra words really do help build the frame for the story, and once you can see the whole structure you can work out which bits are not actually load-bearing after all. It’s often surprising how many parts that originally seemed essential can, actually, be chopped without any lasting damage.

Let the Reader Do The Work

There’s very little room for world-building in drabbles - because there’s very little room for anything. I’ve always assumed that realism would be best, because you don’t have to waste words setting up your environment.

Actually, sci-fi and fantasy settings work very well. No one is expecting a fully-realised world in a hundred words. It’s fair to expect the reader to do a little work, and less really is more; mention an airlock and a space-suit, and they’ll figure out where the action is taking place.

The drabbles I’ve most enjoyed reading have at their heart something a little more universal, something independent of setting or genre. Take, for example, What’s a Commander Have to Do to Get a Decent Cup of Coffee Around Here? We’re clear from the first sentences that we’re on a space-ship, and the story hinges on that setting. But the bones of the story - to me - lie in the emotional tone that we can all recognise.

I always enjoy a reveal at the end of a story, even a story this short, and Checkout Page delivers in a beautifully understated way. As a reader, you’re given all of the pieces, but the drabble stops short of spelling it out.

This feels like one of the reasons you can remove so many blocks from the Jenga-tower of your dravbble. Give the reader the skeleton, and they’ll be willing to fill in all the gaps for you.

Give it a Try?

More than anything, writing drabbles is fun and feels productive. Got a spare half-hour? Bash one out. It probably won’t be perfect, but it’ll be a start. After a few half-hours, you’ll have a few to choose from - and at least one of them will be worth the effort of polishing up.

If you fancy giving drabble-writing a whirl, then I refer you to the contest linked above. Their theme for the current round (open until the end of September) is “time travel gone wrong”.

Is That a Thing Now?

“Verbing weirds language.”

I imagine many of you will be familiar with that quotation from the most excellent Calvin and Hobbes. In the cartoon, Calvin explains that he likes to “verb words”. His example of verbing is “access” - which used to be a thing, but is now something you do.

In the past few years I’ve noticed a comparable, but different trend: the nouning of verbs. To be honest, I blame Paul Hollywood.

It’s more than a decade since The Great British Bake-Off hit the screens in the UK. In case you live under a rock: it’s a TV show in which amateur bakers take part in a multi-round competition. Paul Hollywood was (and still is) a judge, and frequently declares things to be “a good bake”.

I initially understood him to be talking about the quality of the baking process, rather like you might admire the “finish” of a paint job. However, even if that was what he meant, it seems to have become broadly synonymous with cake. Cafés advertise their “tasty bakes”. The label on the box of cocoa in my cupboard declares it to be “ideal for rich bakes”.

I find this a little odd, but these things happen. Bake means cake now, that’s fine.

However, the nouning is spreading. A few weeks ago, someone replied to one of my writing-prompt Tweets to compliment me on “a lovely write”. Which was jolly nice of them, but even as I thanked them I was thinking “a write”? Is that a thing now?

While wrestling open a bag of gnocchi the other night, I noticed the label. Yes, I am a compulsive reader of labels. Gnocchi is, at least according to the British supermarket Tesco, “a hearty eat”. I am very aware that I personally don’t like these new nounings. To me, they feel… babyish. Lumpen and boring.

However, I can’t help but notice that there are plenty of nouns that follow this exact pattern that have existed all my life. The sort of cake one makes in an oblong tin and cuts into squares has always been “a traybake”. Why should I be quite happy having my say, or resisting a change, but opposed to consuming my eat? Perhaps I’m wrong to blame Paul Hollywood, perhaps the rot set in when like became a noun.

Language changes. People will coin new words, and bend existing ones into new shapes, and probably a few people will clutch their pearls over it. The world will not end; the English language will not head inexorably dogwards.

I’m sure it will be just another evolve.

Word Surprise! Billabong

Earlier this week, I was asked if knew what a billabong was.

Well, yes. Of course I do. But at the point at which someone asks, you know they’re asking for a reason and thus the answer you feel to be obvious is probably going to turn out wrong.

We are, by the way, ignoring the surfwear brand here.

So what do I know about billabongs? They’re Australian, obviously. They are some form of watering hole. They are a place you might go to drink.

They are, let’s be honest, a place where a jolly swagman might sit down and wait for various things to happen. (What is a swagman, anyway? That is a separate question. Banjo Patterson has a lot to answer for. And Waltzing Matilda isn’t even one of his better poems.)

As a friend of mine put it when I sprung the “what is a billabong?” question on him: like an oasis, but Australian.

I tentatively gave this as my answer. And it’s not wrong, as such. But much more specifically: billabong is the Australian name for an oxbow lake.

Oxbow lakes are, famously, one of those things everyone remembers from school geography lessons.

Can I remember what the term means? Yup.

Can I draw a diagram of the process of formation of an oxbow lake, thirty years later? Yup.

Have I ever seen one? No *.

Has this knowledge ever been in the least useful in later life? No **.

Now, admittedly the Australian climate apparently means that oxbow lakes are a rather more seasonal affair than they are in my native Britain. Even so: these two incredibly disparate concepts - oxbow lakes and billabongs - turn out just to be different local words for the same thing.

I am quite unreasonably surprised by this.

_{* Actually, I am informed that many years ago on a holiday in New Zealand, I did see an oxbow lake. It was only identifiable as such to someone who assiduously read every last bit of text in a guidebook (guilty), and was not - from ground level - observably an oxbow.}

_{** Has anything I learned in geography been useful in later life? I definitely recall learning the capital cities of African and South American countries, which would come in handy for pub quizzes if only I’d learned them properly rather than cramming one night for a test the following day.}

Gable vs. Dormer

Recently, I was writing a story in which someone had a vision of a house. I had a really clear idea of what I wanted the building to look like; very much like the house in the picture above. I reckoned that it should be possible to do better for a description than “the windows on the top floor had pointy bits going up into the roof”.

Are they gable windows? A gable is the triangle-y part on the end of a ridged roof, but does it apply here as well? Asking around, no one understood what I meant by “gable window”.

A cursory search suggested that maybe what I wanted was a “dormer window”. In which case I felt it was time for a quick redesign of the house in the story. I dislike the word dormer; I associate it with bugalows, and with sad towns that have become nothing more than London commuter overspill.

I took myself off to consult Rice’s Architectural Primer, which is an absolute delight of a book. The cover blurb promises “an indispensable guide to the vocabulary and grammar of British buildings”; the pages are packed with lovely illustrations and the most amazingly obscure words. Twenty minutes later I still had no idea what the windows were called, but was quite taken with vermiculated rustication, and had learned the difference between torus and scotia.

After some more browsing, I concluded:

1. A dormer window is set upright on a sloping roof, so these are not dormer windows.

2. These are probably just windows, with gables above them.

3. The above is more or less useless if no one else understands what I mean, and frankly “pointy bits going up into the roof” may well paint a better picture.

Ah, well. Back to the writing!

Many thanks to Denise for sending me a photo of her house to demonstrate the pointy bits.

Raglan

On a recent foray into Wales, I paused to explore Raglan Castle.

“Notice,” said the guide book sternly as I passed the gatehouse, “the machiolations”.

Fortunately, it went on to explain that a machiolation is “an arched opening at battlement level, through which suitable missiles could be dropped on a besieging army”. If you wish to notice them, you can do so on the top of the gatehouse towers over on the right hand side of the picture above.

Honestly, machiolations aside, it's a really good castle and well worth a visit. It's a fabulous mix of different historical layers as subsequent owners changed it from a medieval defence into a fancy status symbol with pleasure gardens, then had to bring it hastily up to snuff for the Civil War. Sadly it turned out to be on the wrong side of that particular conflict, and the keep was deliberately undermined to collapse into the moat when the Right But Repulsive side won.