Be Careful What You Say!

I've always been fascinated by the power of language. It's a very strange phenomenon, when you stop to think about it. We open our mouths and make peculiar sounds which somehow convey thoughts and feelings from inside our brains into someone else's mind. How does that happen? 

Of course, it doesn't always work.

'We're packing in the travels this year,' I said to my husband. 

He looked at me in surprise, understanding this to mean that I wanted to see an end to our travelling. What I intended to say was that we were cramming in a lot of travelling again. Since embarking on my new Lucy Hall series, our usual annual travels to all around the UK and Europe have increased, taking us away more frequently and further afield as far as the Seychelles and New Orleans. 

Once you start to consider the quirks of our language, instances come easily to mind. What, we might wonder, is a 'civil war'? In battle do the combatants politely ask permission before shooting one another? And wouldn't it be nice if people's appearances were judged in the the same way as chances, given that 'a fat chance' is the same as 'a slim chance'. 

There are many instances of ambiguity in literature. Some are deliberate, as when Shakespeare's witches chant 'Fair is foul'. Others are clearly not deliberate. In Thackeray's Vanity Fair, a character reports that 'he and I were both shot in the same leg.'

One of my favourite illustrations of the ambiguity of language is the child who was asked in a test to 'Take 7 from 93 as many times as you can.' The child answered 'I get 86 every time.' 

And the advertisement that claimed 'Nothing acts faster than Anadin'.

Ambiguity is not only created by words. The surprisingly popular book 'Eats shoots and leaves' gives us many examples of ambiguity created by punctuation.  

A woman: without her, man is nothing.

A woman, without her man, is nothing.

Thinking about ambiguity is entertaining, but it's also a reminder to us all to be careful how we express ourselves. Thoughtless words can not only be unintentionally hurtful or insulting, they can change the meaning of our intended message. 

Blogging

I wrote somewhere, rather pompously, that if you call yourself a writer you have a duty to at least try to write well. In my books I do my best to express myself clearly in correct English. This takes hard work because, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, 'The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.' 

Many authors, some of them very successful, seem to pay scant attention to the quality of their prose, which I think is a pity. Others, like Ian McEwan or Kazuo Ishiguru, express themselves so lucidly that it is a pleasure to read their books just for the beauty of the language. 

In my own way I'm a bit of a pedant, and quite old-fashioned. For example, I try not to including contractions in my work, although there is no good reason why a writer of commercial crime fiction should avoid them. There may even be an argument in favour of using them, as 'don't' and 'can't' speed up the pace, where 'do not' and 'cannot' maybe slow it down. I suppose decades of teaching teenagers how to write 'properly', in correct, formal English, has left its mark on my writing. 

But writing for a blog is different - especially when it is a post for my own personal blog. Here, I am  free to use excessive punctuation, for example!! (Would I ever use double exclamation marks in a book??? Of course not!!!) What might look inappropriate in a novel to my blinkered eyes, seems perfectly acceptable here. 

Of course blogs are not solely outlets for trivia. Many bloggers analyse, critique and comment on important issues in culture and current affairs. A blog can be whatever the writer chooses to make it, and we are fortunate to live in a period where blogs are so many and so varied.

In his droll and whimsical novel, Tristram Shandy, the eighteenth century writer Laurence Sterne set out to break all the contemporary rules of fiction, in an ingenious parody of the rather self-consciously worthy novels of the time. I think Sterne would have relished the liberty of a blog.

http://leighrussell.co.uk