Lord Grey’s Lisp: Or, how to write speech impediments (or not)

Readers of Dorothy Dunnett might already know where I’m heading with this. For them, I say “Stop now, if you wish. Nothing new to see, here.”

For the rest of you: Current common practice in the copyediting biz is to minimize representation of speech impediments. This purpose is twofold: It simplifies the reading, and it avoids stereotyped speech. However, as they say, ’twas not always thus. In 1961, specifically in the first book of the Lymond Chronicle, The Game of Kings, we encounter Lord Grey and his lisp. Indeed, we cannot avoid it, as every word containing an S is spelled with a -th in its place. More S’s, more -th’s. Like this bit, following an especially S-filled rant:

“Ith there no word in the Englith language wanting an Eth?”

And my personal favorite, if I may be allowed to have one:

“Athathinth!”

I hope you can see how distracting it is to decipher the actual words of our poor Lord Grey, whose lisp is a temporary issue following a battle wound. (It disappears later on in the book.) My initial reaction was to wonder why this choice was made and retained. A moment later, I realized I’m looking at words written and published 65 years ago, when the business of copyediting was quite different. Social sensibilities were not what they are now. Less attention was paid to negative representations of speech, whether they be from physical difficulty or social status or nationality. It isn’t difficult to find other examples of currently questionable mechanics in dialogue representation. (But I’m not taking the time to do so; if you’re curious, I suggest looking at your own bookshelves or visiting the local library.)

Were this being copyedited today, I like to think that some tactfully worded queries would be passed along to the writer, in hopes that the reader’s enjoyment might be increased. Current practice has us narratively explaining the speaker’s issue and perhaps using a sentence or two with the representative misspellings, after which things return to normal. A reminder every so often is acceptable, and perhaps even called for depending on the situation. If it were my job, I’d argue to keep “Athathinth!” because, well, it’s amusing to see and not that hard to parse, but I would fight to eliminate the bulk of the other -th spellings. Telling readers that the speaker has a pronounced lisp and supporting that with the occasional written reminder is preferable, as we think today, to thpelling every thingle Eth-word with the thubthitute -th.

You thee what I’m thaying.

In Amy Schneider’s The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction (2023, University of Chicago Press), she gives the following advice (which, I’m happy to say, I was doing before I read her book): “Skilled authors provide descriptive hints … , vocabulary choices, and a few creative spellings to suggest the flavor of the character’s speech rather than phonetically spelling every accented word.” I would use “affected” in this specific example, as it’s not about accent, but you get the gist.

I am not daring to suggest that Dorothy Dunnett is not a skilled author. Far from it. However, as I said at the start, the work of copyediting has changed with time, and I strongly suspect that, were this work being done today, we would see far fewer -th’s in the text while still being aware of Lord Grey’th lithp.

Born in the 1900s

Or: How old am I, really?

I’m seeing this a lot of late, and it bugs me. It bugs me enough that I got out my trusty Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition, and looked up “decades” and “centuries” (sections 9.34 and 9.35, for those playing along at home) to see whether I’m totally nuts.

I’m not. At least not on this particular matter.

Setting aside the question of words versus numerals, which is strictly a style issue and not relevant to what bugs me: When one says “the 1900s,” not every reader will take away the same sense. Some, like me, will understand that to be “the first decade of the 20th century,” while others will (wrongly, in my opinion, but what do I know) understand it to mean “the whole of the century beginning with 19–.” The imprecision is the problem. Context matters. Always. And it’s not always clear or logical. Most times, but not always.

Was I born in the 1900s? Not to my understanding. I was born in the late 1950s. My maternal grandfather was born in the 1900s, in 1901 to be precise. Both of us were born in the twentieth century. (Using words or numerals there is a matter of taste, and thereafter one of consistency. Do as you please, but don’t switch back and forth. Sharp-eyed readers will notice and be annoyed. I purposefully chose to use one form in the previous paragraph and another in this one, in order to make this very point.)

Here’s where CMoS addresses the meat of my problem. In 9.35, the editors explain: “Note that the first decade of any century cannot be treated in the same way as other decades. Though it commonly appears in journalism and may be clear from the immediate context, ‘the 2000s’ could easily be taken to refer not to a decade but to the whole of the twenty-first century.” They suggest leaving “the aughts” for casual writing, and the same for “the teens.” In formal contexts, the editors suggest the clarity of “the first decade” or “the years 2000–2009″(which may for some be 2001 to 2010, but I’m not discussing that particular knotty issue here, the lack of a “year 0” not being a grammatical problem in any way), “the second decade” or “the years 2010–2019,” and so on.

I will further suggest, although it is not an issue of grammar but of historical perspective, that the further from a given century the writer is, the clearer the use of “the XX00s” becomes. That is, if I say “Chaucer wrote during the 1300s,” readers are unlikely to think I mean “during the first decade of the 14th century.” However, referring to “the 1900s” or, heaven forfend, “the 2000s” in this, the year of whoever 2025, invites confusion. Here’s where I admit I’m unlikely to write what I gave as an example. Clarity is paramount for an editor, and I would write “the 14th century.” (Fun fact: Chaucer died in 1400. Does that mean he saw the dawn of a new century, or the sunset of an old one? Discuss amongst yourselves. Don’t @ me.)

In closing, then, I assure you that while I was born in the 20th century, the years from 1900 to 1999 inclusive (1901 to 2000 if your horological leanings work that way), I was not born in the 1900s but rather the 1950s.

I’m old, but not that old.

Follow me down a Cornish rabbit hole.

In the series I’m currently reading, we are in 19th-century Cornwall. One of the characters uses Cornish words in her normal speech. Great characterization! And I freely admit that I’ve looked up more than one term, which makes me happy. (I love bumping into unfamiliar words and learning about them. That’s why I don’t fret if a client uses an uncommon term. Send the readers to the dictionary once or twice—maybe more often than that—in a book! It’s good for their continuing education.) However, in this particular case, with this specific word, I puzzled a bit more than usual.

The term is “pellar.” It’s a Cornish word for a witch, sorcerer, or wizard, and according to some etymologists it comes from “expeller,” for one who casts out evil but not as harsh or religious as an exorcist, I gather. So, it’s a noun. Cool! Why, then, does it also appear as “pellar witch?” Isn’t that somewhat redundant? We don’t speak of “exorcist priests,” so why would we say “pellar witch?”

This is the kind of problem that makes me stop reading and start thinking deeper. What would I have done, had I been the editor on this book? Well, I certainly would not have said “Don’t use this term.” It makes absolute sense for this character to use the old language. And the one to whom she speaks isn’t confused by it, so there must be some familiarity there even though the listener isn’t Cornish. (That’s where I stopped thinking deeply. I want to keep reading, not re-edit the book.) It’s this particular example that bothers me. We wouldn’t say “exorcist priest,” so why would we say “pellar witch?” Earlier in the book the term “pellar blood” appears, and that didn’t tweak me in the least; “witch blood” is a common concept in the kinds of literature I enjoy.

I went in search of this word, “pellar.” It’s not in Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary. It might be in the OED, but I don’t have a paid subscription, and the app is limited in scope. (Of course I have dictionary apps on my phone and tablet. I’m a copy editor.) It’s not in my Encarta World English Dictionary. I cast my net over the unknown waters of the internet, as I have no Cornish dictionary. It’s a failing, I know.

This comes from Wikipedia (I have left the internal links and reference numbers in place):

The terms “cunning man” and “cunning woman” were most widely used in southern England, the Midlands, and in Wales.[9] Such people were also frequently known across England as “wizards”, “wise men” or “wise women”,[9] or in southern England and Wales as “conjurers“[9] or as “dynion hysbys” in the Welsh language.[10] In Cornwall they were sometimes referred to as “pellars”, which some etymologists suggest originated from the term “expellers”, referring to the practice of expelling evil spirits.[9] Nineteenth-century folklorists often used the term “white witch” to refer to cunning folk, although this was infrequently used amongst the ordinary people themselves, as for them the term “witch” had general connotations of malevolence and evil.[8]

Did the author research this aspect? Did the editor? Why do I care? Because I would have gone down this rabbit hole if I had been the editor. Is “pellar witch” a known term? Or is it newly minted for this book? Would the author have said “exorcist priest?” I doubt it.

Now that I’ve spent over an hour on this particular niggle, I think it’s time to let it go. Editors can do that. It’s legal. I want to be a reader again.

There’s more than one way to write a passive sentence.

And that’s one, right up there. So’s the one preceding this.

Not all passive sentences use passive voice. However, the common thread is reversal of the expected grammatical order, placing the object of the verb as the subject of the sentence. It’s less visible—and somewhat inside out—with the expletive construction, also called agentless construction, but it’s still there.

I’ve written about the passive voice before, as I have about expletives, but it’s time to revisit. Academic and technical writers are fond of the passive voice, as in “The experiment was performed in our lab over a period of six weeks.” Not only is that in passive voice (the grammatical subject is the object of the verb), it’s also agentless (we aren’t told who performed the experiment). Contrast that with the agentive construction “I was struck on the head by a mallet.” We don’t know who struck me, but we know they used a mallet. The mallet is the agent, the thing that performs the action. (The wielder is, presumably, unimportant. Certainly unknown.)

A clearer agentive construction is this one: “I was struck on the head by my assailant.” The weapon doesn’t matter (for whatever reason). I could even say “I was struck on the head with a mallet by my assailant.”

That’s a clunky way of saying “My assailant struck my head with a mallet.” But that’s not how we present information in, say, a victim statement to the police. The active voice doesn’t serve us well in that situation. We put ourselves first, usually. It really is all about us.

Expletive constructions use phrases like “it is” or “there are” to open the sentence, adding nothing to the sense or meaning of the sentence. All they do is delay the appearance of the subject. While that can be effective in some cases, it’s usually best to recast the sentence. Be aware, though, that “It is a red coat” is not an expletive construction. That’s a subject and its complement (“it” and “coat” or “red coat”). “It’s common knowledge that he’s a liar and a cheat,” though, is an expletive construction. “It’s” doesn’t add any meaning to the sentence. Without it, we’d say “That he’s a liar and a cheat is common knowledge” (or, more likely, “Everyone knows he’s a liar and a cheat”). Using the expletive “it’s” feels more natural. In “There are four lights,” the word “there” adds nothing to the sense. It’s an expletive. It doesn’t tell us where the lights are. It just . . . takes up space in the sentence.

I’m reminded now of that lovely quote from Gertrude Stein. “There’s no there there.” I’ll leave the pondering up to you.

Period words: words, period

To use the language of text memes: “Not me leaning toward the television, pointing and shouting ‘That hasn’t even been said yet!'”

It certainly was me, while watching an episode of “Mystery!: Cadfael” (season 3, episode 3, if you care) and hearing the following line: “You know what they say, all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Trouble is, Cadfael is set in the late 12th century. Well before John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke. While the saying is commonly attributed to the latter, the former wrote something nearly identical. Why latch on to Burke, and not Mill? I have no idea. But that’s what has happened. Anyway . . .

WARNING: Spoilers await you.

I don’t have a copy of Ellis Peters’s book The Raven in the Foregate (Peters is the pen name of Mary Edith Pargeter, by the by), so I can’t check the source material for the show. However, something tells me the author wasn’t the one who did this. I suspect the screenwriter, frankly, attempting to use phrasing the audience is familiar with. The same thing happened earlier in that episode when the new (evil) priest called a young woman, whose confession he had refused to hear and who subsequently took her own life, “a doxy.” That word is dated to the late 17th century. About 500 years after this series (of books and of shows) is set. I didn’t shout at the TV, but I cringed.

All of this is to prove a point I regularly make with my fiction clients. If you’re writing historical fiction, you must beware of pulling readers out of the story with your word choices. Do you want someone flinching at phrasing, or worse, throwing your book across the room? Granted, if it’s an ebook they probably won’t want to break the device they’re reading on, but one never knows, does one?

“Is It Harris’ or Harris’s?”: Sibilant Mechanics

Hey, folks. It’s been a minute. Well, okay, more like almost a year to the day, but I’m not counting. Obviously.

We’re entering a new phase of history, one in which it will be necessary to know how to correctly form possessives and plurals of names ending in sibilants (Ss). I follow the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines. Others will adhere to AP. Still others may use different guides. Do what you like; just remember my main rule. Pick one, and be consistent.

All righty then.

Harris. The possessive is “Harris’s,” per Chicago style. (AP would tell you it’s “Harris’.”) The guideline for Chicago is “If you say it, write it,” and since we (most of us, anyway) would voice that possessive S, it’s spelled out.

Walz. The possessive is “Walz’s.” That Z is said like the S in “walls,” so it’s not a sibilant. It doesn’t hiss (hear the hiss in “sibilant?”). It’s voiced.

Harrises. (Except, you know, Kamala’s husband is Doug Emhoff, so how often we’ll need to know how to pluralize “Harris” is up in the air.) Add the -es. It’s a “regular plural,” as the grammar books call it.

Walzes. Another regular plural. Add the -es.

Now for the real fun.

Harrises’. That’s the plural possessive. Just put an apostrophe on the end of the plural that ends in S. You’re done.

Walzes’. Same deal here. Put an apostrophe on the end of the plural that ends in S.

No quiz today. But I’ll ask you to watch the media reports and notice who gets it right (and who doesn’t). It’ll be fun for some of us. Watching your social media? Not as fun, and I don’t suggest poking bears with the “You styled that wrong” stick. Those who care, care. Those who don’t . . . well.

“Untranslatable” is Anglo-centric

Have you noticed that every writeup about “untranslatable words” includes translations of them?

That has annoyed me for years now. It’s othering to the languages of those words. There’s nothing worse or better about words that have no one-to-one translation from their home languages into English. English winds up borrowing them most of the time as loanwords, anyway, because they’re so darn useful. Schadenfreude. Hygge. Smorgasbord (of course, English eschews the Swedish diacriticals).

I won’t turn this into a diatribe. Neither will I be going into great detail about loanwords. Chances are you already know what they are, how we get them, and how they’re absorbed. My point is simple and direct: Stop saying “untranslatable” when that isn’t true. If you can’t stop, at least admit that it’s inaccurate and what you really mean is “We have no word for this in English.”

The concepts aren’t untranslatable. If they truly were, we’d have lists of words in their home languages with no explanations whatsoever. They’re inconvenient to us as English speakers because we have no single term in English that means precisely what they mean.

To me it all comes back to English thinking it’s the be-all and end-all, when it isn’t either of those things. It’s just another language on our planet. Languages have words for concepts that are important to their speakers. Think on that for a bit the next time you run into something “untranslatable.”

Social (unsocial) media thoughts

This has zero to do with editing or grammar or usage or any of the usual things I write about. But it’s important to me to get this out there for the eleven people who’ll read it.

I’ve left Twitter for good. I did that months ago, really, but I’m saying it again. I’m not going back to that place. Even keeping my account there as a placeholder was, to me, providing support for what’s happening there, which I don’t condone in any fashion whatsoever. No bird site for me.

I abandoned Facebook years ago and never looked back. Therefore, no Threads for me either. I’m seriously considering nuking my Instagram account, but my only hesitation there is it’s a connection to my kids and colleagues (in a nonprofessional manner, as I only post personal stuff there). Still, I’m tacitly supporting Zuckerberg by staying. It’s wearing on me.

Bluesky? No thank you. That’s just going back to supporting Dorsey. I left Twitter for a reason. Going to another platform run by the same dude? WTF? No.

I’ve tried Hive and Post, too. They didn’t do much for me. Meh.

Mastodon is my choice in this venue. Nothing will replace Twitter. That magic was wrecked and burned. But what I’m building on Mastodon is a fine replacement (not substitute, as that has connotations I don’t feel are accurate here) for what I had there. No, I don’t have the same camaraderie I did. No, I don’t see the same waves of interest I did.

But I’m connecting with people I’d never have found there. And they’re from a far larger pool. An ocean or two.

And there are a few folks who made it there from other places, and we’ve found one another, and that makes it homey. Some I hadn’t seen in a few years, which was a lovely surprise.

So, there you have it. If you find me on Mastodon, that’s great! If you’re staying away because of Reasons, that’s your choice. We’re all adults here, we get to decide for ourselves.

I’m still GramrgednAngel. That hasn’t changed, nor will it (barring unforeseen circumstances). Keeping the same handle makes sense. I chose the zirk.us instance (server), one that’s focused on arts and humanities. I had no interest in joining one of the huge instances.

Find me, if you’re of a mind. I’ll be glad to see you.

Weird Victorian mechanics: Ca’n’t, wo’n’t, and more

Yes, I’m speaking of the mechanics of punctuation.

In reading Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (Beer, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016), I’ve been sidetracked by the appearance of apostrophes where I’m unused to finding them. I’ve put them right up there in the title; that’s how distracting they are. They deserve greater notice.

And explanation.

But in my research into this oddity—and to be sure, it is an oddity, even for Carroll’s contemporaries—I’ve found an amazing blog post from 2007 by Gabe Doyle, then a doctoral candidate at Stanford, to which I link below. There’s little point in my regurgitation of its contents when it’s perfectly simple to link to it, and let you all read at your leisure (or ignore it entirely, if you choose).

Also note that although he makes no mention of “ca’n’t” in his post, it appears in Carroll’s works and thus in the text I’m reading currently. This curious use of apostrophes is apparently related to the logic of using one where a letter is omitted, rather than letting it stand in for more than one as we do with “can’t.” That, at least, is the short form of the explanation. And such logic is logical, coming from a mathematician like Dodgson/Carroll.

And what’s up with “won’t,” anyway? Where’s the O come from, if it’s short for “will not?”

Find the answer to that and much more at the link below.

Preposterous Apostrophes V: Contractions
Will you, wo’n’t you, will you, wo’n’t you, will you click the link? (with apologies to the Mock Turtle)

National Grammar Day 2023

Martha Brockenbrough started this particular grammar ball rolling back in 2008. Because the date, March 4, is also rendered March 4th in certain circumstances, it is not only a date but an imperative with a homophone for “fourth”: March forth! It was (and presumably still is) her intention that people fond of grammar would take the day to celebrate the joys of “good grammar” (as she called it) and share those joys with others.

My take on “good grammar” might not be yours. Or Martha’s.

I’m not a prescriptivist. I don’t get the vapors when I see a “less than 10 items” sign at a checkout. Some of my colleagues and I had a discussion about that very thing (the “rule,” not the vapors) just this past week. Turns out that it’s not so much a rule as a guideline, rather like the pirates’ code of which Captain Barbossa spoke so fondly. We were hard-pressed to find precisely when this rule entered the common knowledge; it seems that some fellow named Baker opined on it in 1770, and within a century or so his opinion had been hardened into a so-called rule by others quoting him. (You can find this information in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, 1997.)

Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Butterfield, ed.; fourth edition, 2015) says this about the controversy:

“The starting point is that according to the rule, infringement of which causes a violent, Pavlovian reaction among the grammatically pure in heart, the comparative adjective fewer is used with count nouns . . . or with collective nouns. By contrast, less is used with noncount nouns.”

But wait! There’s more. In the third section we find the following.

“The injunction against less in front of plural count nouns seems to have been launched by one grammarian in 1770, related specifically to less in front of numbers, and was tentative rather than dogmatic. Since then it has developed into a rather more extreme and expansive ban.”

So, not only was it not intended as a rule from the start, it was a guideline/opinion about a specific usage of the word. But people being people, they love their binaries. Yes/no, right/wrong. Now, what was never wrong to start with gives some folks the vapors.

Note that this usage is more common in spoken English than in written, and that it’s wholly idiomatic. We can trace it back to Alfred the Great circa AD 888 (first recorded—written—use).

This is also likely why, when I dug for it, I found no trace of such a rule in either the Cambridge or Oxford grammars.

All of this to say: There are many “good grammars.” I wouldn’t recommend going out and purposely riling folks up over idiomatic usage, but I don’t feel we need to rein it in, either.

March forth, readers, and speak and write English as you do!