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Ah, yes! The English language. So versatile. So adaptable.

Just read this snippet of Beowulf aloud and drink in the beauty.

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,

Stone Carving Free Stock Photo - Public Domain PicturesThis is the part where you go, “Huh?”

That is, in fact, English. Only it’s usually called “Anglo-Saxon.” If you hear it read out loud, you’ll hear something resembling Dutch. To those of you in the Netherlands or who speak Dutch, I said resembles it. Dutch didn’t even exist when this was written. Well, when it was spoken. The poem is actually a Danish epic, but you’ll find nary a word of Old Norse in it, never mind French, Latin, Celtic, or any of the dozens of languages English has ambushed in a back alley to steal words over the centuries. 

So how is this English? 

This is actually what linguists mean when they say Old English. Basically, as the Roman days in Britain waned, three Germanic tribes drifted in. The Saxons from Saxony (Duh.), the Angles from Angeln in modern-day Schleswig in Germany, and the Jutes, from Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. The Saxons settled in the south. The Angles took the Midlands and, after uniting their kingdoms, gave the country its name: Angleland, land of the Angles. Never mind England’s culture before the Vikings moved in permanently was largely Saxon. The Jutes went to Kent, which explains why that particular county still has its own unique culture and is yet quintessentially English. The Church of England is based there, and that’s where St. Patrick got his marching orders to go handle the snake problem in Ireland.* All these tribes spoke an early form of German, as did the Vikings to the north (who were not yet Vikings, but they were working on it.) They had to talk to each other and to their new neighbors, the Celts, and to the lingering Romans. Sprinkle in a few Latin constructions so the Romans and Celts could understand, and a new off-shoot of German emerged. 

(And you could still split infinitives and end sentences in prepositions. Remember, the empire that made those rules just collapsed, so why keep up that nonsense? Take that, Mrs. Chaucer. You ruined tenth grade for me!)

Things continued swimmingly for a few centuries. The Angles coalesced around York, their main kingdom being Mercia. The Saxons’ center of power became Wessex (as in West Saxons.) The Jutes become Kent Men and spent their time in the lab trying to invent the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. That would take a while, so they worked on the Anglican Church as a side project. I digress. The language remained more or less isolated. They also didn’t write a lot of things down. Hence, the Dark Ages. Not because civilization fell. Civilizations tend to give way to…Well…Civilizations. If there isn’t one in place already, people tend to build their own. Hence, Anglo-Saxon England, Old Norse Scandinavia. France. The Dark Ages are dark because such people don’t really have time to write things down. They’re busy building. 

So, the next wave are the Vikings, whose idea of a vacation was pillaging and ravishing England, Scotland, and Northern France. Contrary to popular belief, they weren’t really looking for spam. Eventually, though, looting makes a lousy business model. So the Vikings barged into the Angle kingdoms and set up what was called the Danelaw. Around this time, a Saxon king named Alfred the Great–amazing leader, but lousy baker–united the Saxons, Kent, and the remaining Angle kingdoms into one nation, adopting the name for the region for his new country: England. He subjugated the invading Norse, and their language began changing Anglo-Saxon. It was still English, but the Norse, contrary to popular belief, got rid of a lot of the sillier rules of the language. Gendered nouns and verbs began disappearing. Unlike most other European languages, those dealing with the Norse decided “the” was all the definite article they needed. English started to look like, well, English.

And then we have the Welsh. The Welsh do not have a happy history with the Anglo-Saxon and Norse kings of old, but they had an impact on the evolving language. Celtic words began creeping into the language, as a bunch of Saxon nobles carved off a slice of Wales known as the Marches for themselves. Well, live among a people, you start sounding like them.

So by 1066, the language is already morphing into something resembling…um…English. Or, at least, modern English. 

And then came Billy the Bastard. Er, um, William the Conqueror. No, really, one of his epithets was “the Bastard.” LIke the kings from the Danelaw before him, Willy was a Viking. A French Viking. In fact, the Normans didn’t speak Old Norse. They spoke their own special brew of French. And William decreed all England would speak French. And then Willy’s granddaughter Mathilda married an actual Frenchman, Geoffrey Plantagenet. And her son Henry II assumed the throne in England. And so proper French joined Norman French. But those pesky English insisted on speaking Anglo-Saxon. By the time Henry IV took the throne, he decided the Wars of the Roses would be fought in English. And this version of English, Middle English, was almost readable.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

If you read that out loud, you can understand what Chaucer is writing. But this is also where the various pronunciations of “oo” came into being. Between Chaucer and Shakespeare (who actually wrote in Modern English, just the Elizabethan version. Sorry, Rev, but your favorite Bible is not in Old English.), something happened called “vowel drift.” The vowels sounded different in Chaucer’s time, why the rhymes don’t work in the modern ear. Populations migrated. People flocked to England to find work. The language changed.

And then we have Mr. Gutenberg. Gutenberg did a great service to the world: He made books available and newspapers possible. Unfortunately, even though German has some non-Latin letters, he opted to use the strict 26-letter Roman alphabet we all know and love. His rationale was the Pope was Pope over all (Henry VIII enters the chat, followed by his son Edward VI and daughter Elizabeth. They’d like to dispute that.) and so Latin ruled. When Tyndale imported his first printing press, it did not have the thong, the now-obsolete letter denoting the “th” sound in English. There also was a holdover rune from Anglo-Saxon that covered some of the “-ough” words. But Gutenberg didn’t do runes. Umlats, yes. Probably a Spinal Tap fan (Google umlat and Spinal Tap.) But no runes. Them’s pagan letters. And so you have to put tough, thorough thought into how “ough” is pronounced. And here I’d been blaming the French and the Welsh all these years. Turns out it’s a technical glitch, and we get to suffer from it.

And now you know why English has swollen not into a large language but a linguist gang of seven or eight languages that waits in back alleys to mug other unsuspecting languages for words and idioms.

*Yes. I know. That’s a myth. The snakes. Pat worked for the Archbishop of Canterbury, originally one of the guys who could easily become Pope. Work with me, people!

Exclamation pointElmore Leonard once said of exclamation points, “You are allowed no more than three per 100,000 words.”

I shrugged that one off when I read it, because that was Elmore Leonard‘s rules for writing.  But it was always in the back of my mind. If I saw a “!” in my own writing, it’s life expectancy would be very short. (“Very” is another writing tic I’ve talked about before. Like everything else, it’s here because it works.) If I see it in editing, with one exception, I usually will flag it and tell the writer to take it down a notch. 

But while Elmore disdained the !, one must remember it was how he wrote. He also had a Stephen King-like disdain for adverbs. Unlike Steve, Elmore actually stuck to it. I’m getting King’s Never Flinch when it comes out, so I may do an adverb count. But while I don’t share Elmore’s contempt for the !, I do get it. 

For starters, with one very notable exception (Hi, Nathan!), I will mercilessly zap all instances of “!!” or “!?” Also, unless it’s for effect, it should be clear a character is shouting without putting an exclamation point at the end of every line of dialog the character speaks. Remember, someone has to read this, and as always, if it annoys the reader, your book is a DNF, a cute little abbreviation for “Did not finish.” (StoryGraph, an alternative for Goodreads, even has a status for this in addition to Want to Read, Reading, and Read. Bezos, you own Goodreads. Take note.)

But what was that other thing I just did? “!?” That, my friends, is the much maligned interrobang, which has long since been replaced by the acronym “WTF,” often spelled out or replaced with a similar phrase. There’s even a symbol for it with two html codes to render it. ‽ That might be hard to see with this font, so here’s an image from compart.com explaining the technical details:

The interrobang

If “WTF” were punctuation, this is what it would look like. But the interrobang never really caught on, mainly because it’s a comic book construction. Now, comics and graphic novels have their own rules, just like 73X7ing, lol. In prose, this really doesn’t quite cut it. But whoever came up with the interrobang deserves credit for trying. Still, readers find it distracting. The question mark (?) isn’t as scrutinized because we only use them to ask a question. In fact, they’re missed more than overused because some questions are not asked with the pitch of the voice going up. If, like me and a lot of other writers, you “hear” what you write, then a question (almost always in dialog) asked with a voice drop tells another part of your brain, “Hey, this is a period at the end.” I put in more question marks than I take out.

The !, or bang as it’s been called since the early days of computer programming, has a bad reputation because it gets abused. Like semicolons and em dashes*, they can get distracting. The former is because they’re so seldom used and often are more associated with computer code. Java and C# (and SQL, though I refuse to use them in SQL) use semicolons to end commands. Em dashes are a Gen X and Millennial tick, which has resulted in ChatGPT getting a migraine when users tell it to STOP USING SO MANY EM DASHES! I wont’ get into the ethics of how ChatGPT learns, but suffice it to say, we GenXrs and Millennials are baking our bad habits into cyberspace.

Normally, I have rules applied mainly to crutch words: One instance per page unless unavoidable. (“Just” is a nuisance word and hard to weed out as I end up putting back a third of what I cut.) For the exclamation point, I’ll restrict that even more. First, memorize Leonard’s rule: one bang per 100,000 words. And when you or your publisher send me your manuscript, understand, while I may be more lenient than Elmore Leonard, I still restrict it to one per chapter. Maybe one every three, since short chapters are the norm now.

*You can have my em dash when you pry it from my cold, dead–and lifeless–hand. 

"Beautiful Entertainments" italicized in three different fonts.
CC 4.0 2015 Blythwood

There’s one issue our modern computer-based writing and editing has raised. Italics.

When Word Perfect and the dedicated word processing devices surfaced in the mid-1990s, it solved the underlining problem typewriters could not consistently address. Some of the newer ones had underlining options, including the venerable IBM Selectric. A few die-hards will not give up their magic qwerty boxes until  you pry them from their cold, dead, and lifeless hands. But those of us who learned to type just as Steve and Bill were putting a PC on every desk hated typewriters. And I owned three of them over the years. I moved in with a girl who owned a Canon word processor, and I haven’t looked back since. And one of the things it let me do was italicize.

For the last 30 years, italics have been easy. Ctrl + I or Cmd + I makes all your letters slant. Simple. Maybe too simple. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Most people know the basic rules: Book titles, album titles, movies, TV series, magazines and newspapers, and works of art. Yes, I’ve been getting The Mona Lisa wrong longer than some countries have existed. Titles of short stories, chapters, TV episodes, songs, poems, and articles go inside quotation marks. (Double quotes in North America, single in UK and elsewhere in the English speaking world. Be consistent.)

That last line brings up another use. Italics can also emphasize a word or a phrase. I generally shy away from that as a writer, but that’s because I also shy away from stage direction. On the other hand, it can reduce use of that annoying punctuation mark, the exclamation point!

The list above comes from Actually, the Comma Goes Here by Lucy Cripps, a quick and dirty style guide for when you dropped your Chicago Manual of Style on your foot and can’t pick it up until the doctor removes the boot. One thing it left off is ship names. That’s right. Star Trek (for some reason, we don’t seem to italicize franchises, just the individual series and movies) is about the starships Enterprise. But that’s led to some bad editing.

I used to italicize class names for ships. Like the last aircraft carrier Enterprise was of the Nimitz class, named for the USS Nimitz. I stopped probably when I also noticed that Star Wars stopped showing up in italics, which was right around when the original movie was renamed A New Hope*. 

But as a writer, I’ve had to smack a couple of editors’ hands. (I’ve had my hand smacked, too. Occupational hazard.) People start italicizing things which they had no business slanting the letters. Specifically, building names, business names, restaurants, theaters. That’s actually a big no-no. And this is not like the argument between people who require the Oxford comma and people who are wrong. You do not italicize restaurant names, theater names, and buildings and businesses!!! Now and forever, world without end. Amen. Shakespeare debuted Hamlet at the Globe Theater, but the Globe Theater does not exist. No. Don’t do that. Ever.

Italics are not as badly handled as apostrophes, commas, or capitals. But they do get abused. Overusing for emphasis is just as distracting as too many exclamation points or bad dialog tagging (“Get out,” she shrieked shriekily.) As with anything, stick to the basics and use in moderation.

*The proper way to watch A New Hope is to watch Rogue One, then immediate jump into A New Hope, and finishing on YouTube with Robot Chicken‘s “Go for Papa Palpatine” bit. Then, you shall know what the hell an Aluminum Falcon is.

Comic book swear wordIt’s no secret I have a love-hate relationship with my first novel. Published as James R. Winter (later shortened to “Jim Winter” because the former sounded pretentious), Northcoast Shakedown was published by a small press in 2005. Part of my ambivalence toward it comes from the press’s implosion. It cost me an agent (I should have waited three weeks), and pretty much pegged me as… Well, it didn’t do me any favors. But another problem: I did readings on the air a couple of times, and it was a pain in the ass to find a passage I could read without violating FCC regulations. 

That’s right. I wanted my writing to sound tough, and so 90% of the pages had the ever-dreaded, ever-popular F bomb on it. The follow-up, Second Hand Goods, had no such problem. Bad Religion would have been right at home in today’s thriller environment. And Road Rules, my Elmore Leonardesqe caper, suffered only from being too short. But NCS, as I’ve shorthanded it over the years?

Yeah, try standing up in front of a bookstore crowd and reading that when you’re parked next to the kids’ section. Not happening.

But how do we handle language? And as an editor, how do I deal with swearing?

Well, first of all, the author needs to deal with that at the developmental stage. If they do it themselves, great. That means they put some thought in their story before tossing it over my transom for clean up. I’ve flagged spellings of swear words. Every editing tool I’ve seen wants “son of a bitch” written as one word if it’s not spread out as a phrase. However, while I seldom see it these days, “sumbitch” is also common, and I have to smack the tool’s hand for getting in my way. The oddest one, though I’ve seen it three or four times in projects, is “sunuvabitch,” or some variation on that. But you probably read that with no problem. There were a couple of authors who wrote it in such a way that I had to sound it out every time. Now you’ve crossed from giving your editor pause to giving your reader permission to put the book down and not finish. The reader is all, and thou wilt consider thy reader in all things, world without end. (Maybe I need to quit watching Shakespeare and RobWords. That’s another post.)

And to that point, how do we handle swearing? There are multiple schools of thought on that. Some say swearing conveys a lack of intelligence. Others say those who swear tend to be smarter. Neither is true. It’s all preference. But tell that to the reader who wants all her romance novels to sound like Hallmark, where it’s Christmas all year long, and Lacey Chabert solves more crimes than the NYPD Homicide Unit. She wants no swearing in her stories. On the other hand, we have the gent who wants all his stories to feature six-foot-four manly men as protagonists as they rip aliens apart bare-handed and drink gallons of whiskey to shake off their exertions. Swearing is not optional. It’s a requirement. So, how to communicate that to a reader without slapping a trigger warning on it. (The fewer, the better. Look at movie ratings. Those of you who still go to movies.) 

I recommend putting your first swear word in the first two or three pages. As readers tend to skim, they look for things: White space, what is referenced, how graphic or genteel, and yes, language. It doesn’t have to be an F bomb. In fact, if my characters’ language is coarse, I, as a writer, do an F bomb check. Author Marcus Sakey once told me he took out one out of every three. I can see two out of three. When it’s seldom used, you have to think about it in the writing. When I wrote Second Wave, I abandoned the conceit this was a YA series. The character of JT and his companions have disobeyed orders and joined a mission to reach a fallen starship. The mission’s leader, Suicide, is angry and says, “Fuck your loss, little boy! We all lost people!” (I’m doing this from memory, so I may have added exclamation points. I use them, but I’m not a fan.) This was not only war, but JT was mere weeks beyond qualifying as a child soldier, and his companions were child soldiers. Politeness went right out the window. Plus, Suicide is a war veteran who lost one spouse in battle and another to a terrorist bombing. She’s not going to talk to him like an Asian Mr. Rogers.

In the scene where that occurs, context carries the meaning. Already, several of Suicide’s more questionable subordinates demonstrate why they were considered war criminals in the previous major conflict. By the time she loses her temper with JT, it doesn’t matter. But what about crime fiction?

Police and criminals can get pretty salty. I know crime authors who believe you can avoid it in dialog, but anyone who’s ever been in a tense situation knows that doesn’t really happen in real life. On the other hand, Law & Order avoids it while The Wire had one seen where the dialog consisted entirely of F Bombs. One is on broadcast, the other on HBO. As always, know thy reader, thy audience, and thy platform. And quit using “thy” like it makes you sound smarter. 

What about slurs? They exist, and people use them. They can convey a person’s prejudices. But they can also throw a reader out of a story. When I’ve had to write them, I’ve often cringed. It should be obvious this character either lived in a certain environment or was bigoted. Still, too many people conflate the author with their characters. Unfortunately, like singers, actors, and even artists, a writer is performing for an audience. If you want to keep an audience, you have to be aware of the consequences. People are under no obligation to like you, so give them a reason to like you.