I wanted to do a longer update than this, but, presented with the chance to hang an actual cliff, I could hardly resist.
The schedule slips again
I could use a night off of thinking about writing. Apologies; I’ll maybe do two updates later this week to catch up.
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Friday update
Amidst an upcoming weekend full of car-washing, possibly-DMV-visiting sarcastic excitement (and, let’s face it, probably a lot of gaming), I do have three things to flap my gums about.
One, my girlfriend and a close college friend of hers have started a blog in which they’ll talk insightfully about the media about which they obsess and inevitably become more internet-famous than me. It goes something like this:
Or, perhaps more truthfully, this is what happens when fangirls with half-a-million-dollar educations decide to justify the staggering amount of television they watch.
Given that they wrote it, this is not an unfair sentence, but either way, I’m looking forward to seeing what they turn out. Exciting.
Two, I’ve nearly finished a second editing pass on We Sail Off To War. I’d like to have it ebookified and publicated before the end of the year. Considering my goal at the beginning of the year was ‘before summer’, this represents significant schedule slip, but I’ve always been a little lazy.
Three, I started watching Futurama not long ago, and I’ll probably explain why I like it one of these weekends (although I can’t imagine there are many people reading serial fiction on the Internet who don’t already have a feeling one way or the other on Futurama).
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Nathaniel Cannon and the Secret of the Dutchman’s Cross No. 33
Joe worried less about an attack from that direction—he could win a stern chase until nightfall. Nearly due south, about fifty miles distant, a lone Kestrel carrying the wing tanks flew race tracks. Another did the same thing fifty miles ahead.
With no British zeppelins in the area, any attack would have to come from Alexandria, and sixty miles away—just over two hundred miles from the airfield at Alexandria—an Albatross kept a vigil for scouts or attack planes. Inconstant carried no better scout: the glazed nose and aft turret gave the Albatross an unrivaled field of view, and it could loiter for almost eight hours on full fuel. Nor was it a precious combat aircraft wasted on patrol, guzzling even more precious fuel. That was Inconstant’s biggest flaw. With full avgas bunkers, she could only launch her air wing three times, or six if they risked filling her cargo holds with fuel drums. Every hour her scouts flew, she ate into her combat reserves.
Joe had a look up at the wall clock: about four in the afternoon. One more scout rotation would see them to nightfall. “Get the replacements up,” he said. “Hope our luck holds.”
Cannon slipped his chronometer from his pocket: about four in the afternoon. Mainly, it was something to look at besides the remains of van der Hoek and two of his men. Long-dead, they sat back-to-back. The years had seen them decay to little more than scraps of flesh and dark-stained bones. Great gaping holes had been slashed into their shirts. Two held revolvers. One—van der Hoek—held a gold cross on a chain in one hand. Tucked under his arm was a notebook.
“Cap’n,” Iseabail said. “Ye dinna think tha’s a whopping lot of footprints for three men, do ye?”
Cannon frowned. “You’re right. I see at least five sets here. Mr. Masaracchia, how many men did van der Hoek have with him?”
“Five in all, I believe.”
“The other two might have died on the way out,” Burr put in.
“Either way, if we were stopping for bad omens, we wouldn’t have made it this far.” Cannon looked to di Giacomo. “Light a torch off of mine and stay here with your cousin and Isea. Pass me that sack. Burr and I will round up some valuables. If you see anything off, give a shout and head for the dais. We’ll catch up.”
Nathaniel Cannon and the Secret of the Dutchman’s Cross No. 32
From the far end of the burial dais, only about ten yards from Cannon, stairs descended to the main floor. Cannon stood at the top of the flight and marveled. His flashlight’s beam only just revealed the furthest corners of the vast space. If she were carefully handled and came in on the diagonal, Inconstant might even have fit. On the floor, rows upon rows of statues—nearly all of them depicting Osiris or Anubis—stood over hundreds of coffins, each inscribed with hieroglyphics and brilliantly painted with depictions of those interred. Between them were stacked more clay pots, interspersed with the occasional glitter of gold. Cannon directed his flashlight down one row of statues and up the next, and his heart sank. “There he is.”
His hands on its corners, Joe leaned over the plotting table. From the radio room aft, one pirate called out flight names— “Whiskey flight reports position!” —followed by a string of coordinates, coded offsets from Inconstant. Another crewman pushed small wooden counters around the table. Cannon’s system—the boss had never quite taken to true piracy as well as his crew might have liked, and indeed he leaped at these opportunities to turn Inconstant into a treasure hunter, but early on in his career, he had decided that piracy was no excuse for lax combat performance. In the Fearless days, he had realized that the captain with the most information usually won scraps between zeppelins. Accordingly, all of Inconstant‘s pilots knew the ins and outs of navigation, and they reported back to the air wing commander at regular intervals. Even if they were fifty miles off, Joe still had a more complete picture of the battle than did his unseen adversary.
The counters on the table told the tale so far. Inconstant, now over the eastern Mediterranean, drove to the west. Ottoman Cyprus was just over the horizon off to starboard. As soon as he felt he could, Joe planned to cut southwest and then due south, escaping overnight through the mishmash of colonial territories and Turkish puppet beyliks along the North African coast. Joe had five scouts flying. Two Kestrels, both carrying a half load of ammunition, Iseabail’s wing tanks, and long-range radios to eavesdrop on any British flights in the area were on station thirty miles to the southeast.
Commentary, Secret of the Dutchman’s Cross No. 32
This post looks shorter than it is, because it’s more narrative than dialog. Funny how that works. I hate to break in the middle of a paragraph, but I’m mean that way.
Those Fearless Days is one of the titles I have saved for a Cannon anthology someday, along with Cannon’s Famous Flying Fifty-First and a few others I’m saving for a rainy day. Well, a rainier day.
Weekend writing ramble: I am a lexical descriptivist
Let’s get one thing clear before I go any further: when it comes to grammar, I am a very strict prescriptivist—there are rules, and if you want to change them, you’d better have a darned good reason1. You can imagine my surprise when I came to the realization that I don’t care half as much about lexicon.
It started with the kerfuffle over dictionaries literally adding the alternate definition ‘figuratively’ for ‘literally’. The howls of protest in Oxford, England3 and presumably Webster, Pennsylvania4 seemed a bit off to me; it’s like complaining about a map because you’d like your house to be closer to the beach6. No matter how much a dictionary would like to be a dictate-usage-nary, it can’t ignore the language as it’s actually used by the vast body of English speakers who don’t consult a dictionary to determine how to use the language. There are some reasonable points to be made in support of dropping the figurative meaning for literal, like the one that goes, “You’re reducing the richness of the language!”7 I certainly won’t use ‘literal’ in the newly-dictionaried sense: it’s now common enough to be widely accepted, but I don’t have to like it. I just have to accept I might not be in the majority anymore.
Which isn’t hard for me, since in using ‘alright’ I’ve never yet been in the majority8; I was most recently reminded of this by a text from my girlfriend which used ‘all righty’. This is clearly clunky to the point of absurdity9. Obviously, I don’t need convincing, but in an effort to bring you around to my point of view, I’m going to present a couple of criteria on which I judge ‘alright’ to be on the path to acceptance10, and which generalize neatly to other words attempting to penetrate the Anglischer-gestalt. Number one: it’s got a long history as a variant spelling, first attested in the late nineteenth century. Number two: it has distinct meaning. No, really. Historically, ‘alright’ has been used a lot more frequently in written dialog, which fits with my personal usage—’alright’ is a near-synonym for ‘okay’, and as an utterance that’s how people usually mean it. It’s not the same as ‘all right’, which I might use for a list of figures or a section of code: it’s correct in full. “These figures are alright,” on the other hand, makes me think, “These figures are pretty cool.” Number three: it’s following a linguistic pattern that similar words have already11 met. ‘Already’ and ‘altogether’ used to be ‘all ready’ and ‘all together’, and now the merged version and the split version mean different things. Number four, in which I show that I’m still, in my heart of hearts, a prescriptivist: it’s neither a malapropism nor a mispronunciation. ‘Aks’ and ‘for all intensive purposes’ are not defensible. Not all new usages or variant spellings will meet all of these criteria, but the more they meet, the more likely they are to become English and lose the ‘alternate’ tag in the dictionary.
A few weeks ago, I came across this dialect quiz. I posted it on Facebook, and it pegged friend after friend to the geographical area where they’d grown up12. Taking into account the differences between my answers and those given as I watched a few people take the quiz, I had an insight: lexicon has a descriptivist bias. If you show me a grammatical windmill, I will gladly have a tilt. When it comes to words—rather than how they go together—I’m going to pick my battles more carefully than I used to.
Oops. I did say I was going to present a defense of a certain lexical prescriptivist viewpoint, didn’t I13? Okay. So there’s the standard straight prescriptivist who says, “There’s a correct way to talk, and you should talk like this.” This one is not particularly defensible, unless British prescriptivists are going to make a big deal about all of our missing ‘u’s14. Then there’s the other one, which I can get semi-behind: the selfish prescriptivist, who says, “There’s a correct way to talk, and it’s the way I talk. All of you should talk like me.” This neatly answers the whose-lexicon question, and although it does so in a sillyish way, it’s sufficient to make the aforementioned windmill-tilting more applicable to questions of lexicon.
Having to put that last paragraph in really killed my ending. Pity. I don’t think I’m going to spend the time to fix it.
The end.
1. For instance, ask me about the Oxford comma2.
2. It’s necessary and proper.
3. Although the snootily prescriptivist tone of the OED does rather open it to such criticisms, I grant.
4. Yes, I know it’s actually after noted lexicographer Noah Webster. In writing this post I discovered that ‘Webster’ is now actually a genericized trademark for comprehensive English dictionaries in these United States. You learn something new every day5.
5. Such as this: Webster, Pennsylvania has a municipal green space called ‘Donner Park’. I would totally host a party there, but I’m less sure if I’d go to one if invited.
6. I owe this metaphor to someone else, but I can’t remember where I saw it first.
7. This one is distinct, I think, from, “We already have a word for that!” That’s never stopped us before.
8. In spite of my grammar-nerdiness, I only realized there was a controversy on ‘alright’ and ‘all right’ a few months ago. Once again, you learn something new every day.
9. Don’t worry, I’m getting to your side of it.
10. Also, I’m out in front of a language trend here, and I don’t think that’s ever happened before. Let me have this one.
11. See what I did there?
12. I’m apparently more of an enigma. It placed me in my native Pittsburgh in part, but with roughly the same strength on the California coast. No matter how similar my dialect is, though, I’m sure my accent would give me away.
13. (Ref. footnote 9). I got on a roll and didn’t have a good place to fit it in.
14. I suppose they might already, but I don’t know any British prescriptivists.
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No update
Some family health excitement robbed me of the time in which I had planned to type tomorrow’s update. Accept my deepest apologies. Maybe I’ll try to get a writing ramble in on Saturday. I have a topic that the NaNoWriMo Facebook group will probably tut about1.
I also have a little vignette to write in a heretofore unseen setting. It’s not a project I’d want to serialize on the website; if I like how it turns out, I’d probably make it a background novel-length project I work on from time to time. It would be nice to have an option to work on when I’m not feeling whatever’s running on the website.
1. Not in particularly bad way, though. They’ll probably say that I just misunderstand the particular thing I’m going to complain about, which is probably a reasonable objection.
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Nathaniel Cannon and the Secret of the Dutchman’s Cross No. 31
Iseabail paid no attention to Cannon’s clumsy translations, and ran her fingers around the seams between the bricks. “These two move—ye can see the marks where the stanes rubbed. An’ here’s another.” Waving the others out of the way, she switched to the other side of the door. “Three more. I think we push them, cap’n.”
“What if it’s a trap?” said Burr.
“There’s nae anyone dead here, an’ we’ve nae yet found van der Hoek.”
“He could have died outside.”
“What’s the cap’n think?”
Cannon weighed it. “Isea, you aren’t worried about a trap here?”
“I’m not, but I didna spot the last one, either. Bodies could ha’ been moved.”
“The ones at the first trap weren’t, and the ones outside could have been eaten.” Cannon looked the wall up and down. “We’ll try it. They’d expect us to stand in front of the moving bricks if they were building a trap. Stay out of the way. di Giacomo, Isea, get the ones over there. Mr. Masaracchia, give me a hand with these three. Burr, cover the door.” He flattened himself against the wall, made room for the monk, and nodded. The four of them pushed their bricks as one. The bricks slid in, and a grinding sounded from behind the wall. It terminated in a sharp click, and the door shifted. Burr lined up on it with the Thompson, and Masaracchia gave it a good shove. It swung open smoothly and silently.
As the others pointed their flashlights through the door, Cannon lit one of his torches. The firelight cast dancing shadows on the wall. Drawing his pistol, Cannon went inside.
The chamber’s size came as a surprise, swallowing the torch’s light. Cannon walked through its first part, a dais raised above the rest. The ceiling here was only a few inches above his head. Sarcophagi sat in neat rows, clay pots, weapons, and other unidentifiable objects surrounding each one.
Commentary, Secret of the Dutchman’s Cross No. 31
Apologies for the short update—I had to do more editing in-place than usual.
