A Tale Well Told

The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning is VIVID.

“Caught up in the river of people which flowed through the narrow streets, I wandered happily along under the sound of the bells, which competed with the subdued roar of voices.”

From THIS ROUGH MAGIC by Mary Stewart

The vivid description of Lucy’s first visit to the market on this island. Now available as an e-book, This Rough Magic was first published in 1964. Amazon blurb:
Lucy Waring, a young, out-of-work actress from London, leaps at the chance to visit her sister for a summer on the island paradise of Corfu, and what’s more, a famous but reclusive actor is staying in a villa nearby. But Lucy’s hopes for rest and romance are shattered when a body washes up on the beach and she finds herself swept up in a chilling chain of events.

I read this book, a compelling romantic mystery, a few weeks back and gave it five stars, though the ending does have some violence. This heroine isn’t one to avoid dangerous situations! Love how Lucy insists on rescuing the dolphin, and later the dolphin repays her in kind! It’s told in First Person and the character’s use of vivid words, phrases, and descriptions is amazing. I wanted to blog about this someday; today’s prompt can be my nudge.

For example, driving to town with the radio on: “Some pop singer mooed from under the dash.” I had to laugh. 🙂

In Chapter 4 Lucy, sunbathing on the beach, hears frantic chirps from the nearby woods and goes to see what’s troubling the birds. She spots a white Persian cat only a few feet from a baby blue tit, ready to spring, with the parent birds trying vainly to shoo the enemy away. So she grabs the cat. Though not happy, it submits to her holding it “while the parent birds swooped down to chivvy their baby out of sight.”

She carries the cat away and sets it down. “Still purring, he stropped himself against me a couple of times, then strolled ahead of me up the bank.”

This wording gives me such a vivid picture. However, I’ll be turning 70 on Monday and I’ve only seen the word STROP a few times in historical novels. Today it would be an anachronism – yesterday’s prompt word. I picture a man stropping a straight razor, but how many readers younger than me have no clue what the word means?

Anyway, Lucy follows the cat along a narrow path up the hill and comes upon a beautiful rose garden, where “the air zoomed with bees.” She admires “one old pink rose, its hundred petals as tightly whorled and packed as the layers of an onion.”

Here she meets the retired actor, Sir Julian, the cat’s owner, who tells her, “His name is Nit. Short for Nitwit. He’s a gentleman, but he has very little brain.”

A few minutes later… “The white cat rose, blinked at me, then swarmed in an elaborately careless manner up the wistaria, straight into Sir Julian’s arms.
“Did I say he hadn’t much brain? I traduced him. Do you think you could manage something similar?”

I had to look up TRADUCED, which means thoroughly insulted and offended. If you’re a lover of words, too, here’s a snippet from Merriam-Webster re: insults + my own examples:

TRADUCE: to expose to shame or blame by means of falsehood and misrepresentation. It’s one of several synonyms that mean “to injure by speaking ill of.” Choose traduce when you want to stress the deep personal humiliation, disgrace, and distress felt by the victim.

For statements that aren’t outright lies, MALIGN suggests specific and often subtle misrepresentation but may not always imply deliberate lying.
Like, “Guess what? John was on time for work this morning.”

ASPERSE implies continued attack on a reputation often by indirect or insinuated detraction.
“On time? John? That’s amazing!”

If you need to say that certain statements represent an attempt to destroy a reputation by open and direct abuse, VILIFY is the word you want.
“As long as he’s worked here, John’s been at least ten minutes late every morning.”

To make it clear that the speaker is malicious and the statements made are false, CALUMNIATE, though rarely heard these days, is a good option.
“The manager shook his head. Once in awhile John was late – but so were these others who were calumniating (or slandering) him.”

SLANDER stresses the suffering of the victim. It’s a false charge or misrepresentation which defames and damages another’s reputation.

Keelhauling Anachronisms

The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning is ANACHRONISM. Ah! One writing topic about which I frequently harangue caution younger writers.

One area that comes to mind is words and expressions. How many readers know what KEELHAUL means? Likewise, when I see something that comes from a 70s or 80s sit-com being said by a character in the 1930s, it grates. The expression, “Been there; done that,” didn’t exist in my youth. As to our prompt yesterday, EMBIGGEN, please don’t use it in your 1920s mystery or WWII story!

Another area that comes to mind is how effective birth control has changed society.

Grandma had 14 children, spread out over 28 years — the youngest born when she was 48. Her daughter Helen had 17. We once visited a family that had eleven–the youngest six months old and the oldest almost fourteen. As I do family tree research I see evidence of this same prolificacy, even if infant mortality was high.

I also see evidence that some writers born after the 1960s seem to have little idea how things worked before the Pill. They create promiscuous girls and put them in a setting where a young lady wouldn’t have dared. Girls have affairs with no consequences. Fat chance!

Social mores kept most girls on the straight and narrow–abstinence being the only sure means of birth control. Should a girl lose her purity she risked falling pregnant. Especially before the 1920s she’d risk becoming a social outcast, tainting her family with scandal–especially her sisters–and losing hope for a decent marriage. You see this in Pride and Prejudice, where Lydia’s whole family would have been disgraced by the scandal of her running off with Wickham. Only the hasty forced marriage of those two allowed her sister Elizabeth to wed Mr Darcy.

Seldom mattered if the girl had consented or not, she was blamed. If a victim spoke up, lawyers would tear her life to shreds in court. “Shotgun weddings” were many. Thousands, if not millions, of young women lost their lives in botched back-street abortions. Babies were born in secret and confined to orphanages. (Read Oliver Twist.) Anyone who wants to write about illicit affairs in the pre-Pill era and get a good picture of the mindset back then should read the first half of Ben Wicks’ compilation, Yesterday They Took My Baby.

We had such a situation in our clan. Grandma’s sister went to teach school in a small SK town and met and became engaged to a young man. I know not the intimate details, but when she fell pregnant he left for parts unknown. Took off, as we say, and left her to face the music. She died giving birth to twins and Grandma had to go bring her body home. On her 1904 death registration “cause of death” was left blank. Great-Grandma would have nothing to do with this “fallen daughter” and wouldn’t allow her to be buried in the family plot because she’d disgraced them. The twins were given to relatives–a childless couple.

And the fellow? Apart from whatever twinges of conscience he may have felt, it was no problem for him! No, the double standard seems so unfair, but that’s how it was. A writer can’t correct history by freeing her female characters from the normal consequences women did face. Prior to WWI few young women had money, or even the means to earn any, so running away from parental wrath often meant putting yourself out on the street and into the hands of “white slavers.” Even when I was young, an uneducated woman could barely manage to pull in a wage that would house and feed her.

I see in my family tree there were a few small families, perhaps because the couple worked out some birth control, but more often because of health issues. For single girls of that era, perhaps a botched abortion might render a young woman infertile. Even so, the talk! Communities were closer; everyone knew. The gossip, upturned noses and social rejection were serious. Some families would rally round, some would cast out the sinner. Some parents quickly married off the wretched girl to whoever would have her. Some girls took that option themselves.

This is not 1800s stuff; this was the scene when I was a girl in the 1950s. Writers need to research the social mores of the area in which they’re setting their story. Please, rid your work of post-Pill anachronisms and make your stories as true to their times as you can.

Growing A Vocab

The Ragtag Daily Prompt word yesterday was EMBIGGEN. Though I’m a day late for posting the response that came to mind when I first saw it, my mind is still on that word.

It was a new one on me so I looked it up in M-W and found that it’s a new word added because of a ’90s TV comic series. Normally I think that words added to a person’s vocabulary and/or the dictionary indicates an increase in knowledge. As we learn, we usually expand our repertoire of useful words. EMBIGGEN, on the other hand, seems like a dumbing-down of vocab. Lacking words like enlarge, expand, extend, increase, the inventor tacked an iffy prefix and suffix onto BIG and send it out into the world.

Rather like calling scrambled eggs an eggbeat. “My eggbeat was too enrunable”

Re: EXPANDING. One of the things I did when we were in the city yesterday is exchange jigsaw puzzles with a friend. She lives in a small seniors’ block with a number of others who enjoy puzzling, as do the seniors living at our nearby Villa, so every blue moon we do an exchange. I filled two boxes with about 15 puzzles I had here; she in exchange gave me a HUGE black garbage bag plus a smaller bag. Counting them later I found a total of 26 — and one was a multi-pack of seven! So instead of decreasing my puzzle stash, I’ve embiggened it. All lovely–and almost all 1000-piece puzzles. (Villa folks prefer 500-piece ones, but they’ll tackle these lovely scenes, I’m sure.)

Embiggened is a good word to describe my upper lip right now, too. As in swelled or puffed up. I felt a small cold sore — or fever blister — arising at the corner of my mouth. By evening my whole upper lip was burning. Now I’m sporting FOUR large bumps spread across my top lip, each doing its bit to fatten the whole. As in the old song, I’ll be “sipping cider through a straw” today.

Doing a quick exchange with another blogger about translation programmes. I wonder if embiggen has been added — or will it be too transient to bother with? What about RETWEET, another new word? Constantly being improved, these programmes are still limited — you still need a proofreader — because English words have so many different applications. I recall one Spanish ESL student laughing about the idea of a nose running! Or consider telling a doctor that your elbow joint isn’t running fast, when you should be saying it isn’t functioning properly.

When we lived in Quebec, some journalist did articles about English companies using translation programmes and the hilarity that resulted at times. For example: gloves with stretch fabric “for a snug fit” became “for a comfortable seizure.” The words mind and spirit — the one word ESPRIT in French — so easily get mixed up, too. In one case, “It doesn’t violate the spirit of the author” with a dictionary’s help became “It doesn’t rape the mind of the author.”

Using the precise word is essential to good communication — and we are so blessed to have such a range of precise words. 🙂

Pixabay image

Haiku on City Streets

city streets
so many avenues
of division
bus stop chatter
discussing global warming
in the icy drizzle
daycare outing
their future geologist
studies sidewalk cracks
preschool prep
precocious writer
telling tales
alone in a crowd
wandering aimlessly
rustling leaves
vagrant in the alley
finds a hole in his shoe
another cloudburst

Sizzles & Fizzles

Don’t you just hate it when things explode in the microwave? I was heating up a few chunks of pork in BBQ sauce for dinner, and left it a bit too long. I heard this “POP” and my meat mix sprayed all over the mike. Quite a clean up operation!

When I got up this morning at 7:30 the temp was -20 C and the trees decorated with hoarfrost. Lovely start to the day! The sun came up and soon the frost was dusting down. I took a short walk down our lane to get a bit of fresh air. While the temp hasn’t got up to -10, the warmth of the sun has been melting some of our snow and ice. I see the forecast is for warmer days to come, so spring will soon be here.

Sadly, I haven’t been feeling the best this week. Had a sore throat two weeks ago and finally got antibiotics that cleared it up. I had a few really good days this past weekend, but Wed morning I woke up with a sore throat and sinus problem again, and it’s persisting. I’ve decided to see a doctor today. Last time around I suffered for about ten days before going for help; this time I’m not going to wait. Just don’t have the immunity to get over it without help.

My energy has fizzled again, which is why I haven’t been doing much blogging. Some days I even feel like throwing out all my house plants because I just haven’t the energy to water them! “To everything there is a season,” and this seems to be my season to snail along until my immunity builds up and energy levels come back. So if I’m not posting or visiting my fellow bloggers as often, you know why. I do appreciate all of you who read my scribblings and follow this blog, and wish you all a great weekend.