Month: January 2025

Anglo-Saxon knightToday, we’re going to have a little bit of fun. We’re going to talk about English. What is it?

According to WIkipedia, “English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain.” That’s technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.* In reality, English is a linguistic mob led by a medieval form of Germanic that lurks in dark alleys waiting to mug other languages to steal words, phrases, and even sentence structures, leaving the victim language bewildered and afraid. (Sidenote: I don’t think Japanese is scared of any other language, but Klingon tends to keep the bat’letlh sheathed ‘cuz it don’t want no trouble.)

So why is English such a mishmash of rules, words, and idioms that have no relation to each other? Why is the “k” in “knife” silent? (Blame the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.) Why so much Latin and French in the language? (Blame the Normans.) And why does “-ough” have too many ways to pronounce it? (Blame Gutenerg and Tyndale.) And how in the hell did we end up with a Latin alphabet of 26 letters when English has a minimum of 42 sounds. (48 if you use the Shavian alphabet. I’m actually not opposed to that idea, except you’d have to learn to read all over again.)

First, where did English come from?  Well, as the quote above says, it’s a West Germanic language. It came from Germany shortly before the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain. Prior to that, the inhabitants spoke Latin, Celt, and a few other languages. But the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes didn’t so much invade Britain as they landed there over time and decided they liked the place. A few Romans stuck around, and so the new dominant culture, a mix of those same Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, began speaking their common tongue. In a foreshadowing of the future, this new language promptly raided Latin for a handful of constructions. (No, that does not prove the Latin nerds right about prepositions and split infinitives.) While the Jutes were basically ancestors of the Vikings (from Jutland in Denmark), they adopted the evolving Germanic of these Angles and Saxons, later dubbed “Anglo-Saxon.” We still speak a lot of Anglo-Saxon today, but the actual Anglo-Saxon would be unrecognizable both in writing and spoken aloud. It’s the basis of the modern English language, hence we call it “Old English.” Only, it sounds like Dutch.

Anglo-Saxon gave us Beowulf, an epic poem that actually came from the Vikings. Originally, they wrote in runes, but the conversion of the British Isles to Christianity prompted them to adopt the Roman alphabet, keeping some runes to denote certain sounds. For instance, the letter “y” has a slightly different counterpart to the voiced “th” sound that was still used up until Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare and the King James Bible are actually written in modern English. Parts of Yorkshire and Appalachia have kept a lot of this dialect, which falls under the “Elizabethan” banner. But if you want to know why your favorite Renaissance fair has a lot of shops that say “Ye Olde Smithy” or “Ye Olde Turkey Leg Shoppe,” the “Ye” is not the plural ye Jesus used with his pals in the KJV. It’s actually “the.” And that “y” looks different from the one in “yes.” (My favorite Thes album is Close to ye Edge, but I have a soft spot for Drama and 90125. See how silly that mistake sounds?)

Then came the Vikings. Like other languages (including the Old Norse of the Vikings), early English gendered and pluraled their definite articles. If you know Spanish or French, you’ve seen four definite articles–el, los, la, and las in Spanish, for instance. Like most Germanic languages, this got confusing once the Norse settled down and became rivals to the Saxons and overlords of the Angles. (Hence, “England.” Land of the Angles. Saxony was already taken.) They convinced their Anglish and Saxon in-laws to simplify things by just saying “the” without regard to gender or singular vs. plural. In fact, English no longer genders its nouns, not even neuter. They’re just nouns. 

Where things get hairy is the Norman Conquest. After bending French to their will by creating their own dialect, these Viking-descended French proceeded to remake the English language in its own image. So half our words come from French. Not content with that, Willy the C’s grandson, Henry II, had a father named Geoffrey Plantagenet, who was a traditional Frank. So now another version of French came ashore, further muddying the waters. Then King John lost all of Normandy except for two islands (the Channel Islands), English began to drift back into mainstream. But it wasn’t the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred the Great or Canute. This was Middle English. The best example of this version of English is The Canterbury Tales, by John LeGaunt’s (progenitor of the current royal family) BFF, Geoffrey Chaucer. If you read Canterbury Tales in its original form (with modern letters used), you can make some sense of it, or get a bad headache trying. Spoken, it sounds like heavily accented modern English. By this point, English had inherited the pillaging ways of the Vikings, who added to Anglo-Saxon and began raiding Latin, the neighboring Celt languages, and even Dutch and German for words. Another funny thing happened on the way to Shakespeare: Vowel drift.  

It was around this time that -ough started to take on as many pronunciations as possible. In Chaucer’s time, it was pronounced like “cough,” only with a soft K sound at the end instead of an H or silent. So you would plugh your field, but if you did it in the rain without a coat, you would catch a cogh, and that might be rogh. According to language nerd Rob Watts, whose RobWords YouTube channel I’m now addicted to, the ough sound, represented by a letter that looked something like a stylized 3, began to change when the Black Death abated in London. (Ironically, so did the Wars of the Roses and the Hundred Years War.) People speaking different dialects drifted toward the major cities like York and London seeking higher wages because, well, death creates labor shortages.  Also, people from other countries came to England seeking higher wages because, well, death creates labor shortages. But that letter might have preserved a uniform -ough sound. Then Gutenberg had to create his printing press with a Roman-only alphabet.

Mind you, Gutenberg was German and only had to replace one letter and maybe slip in an umlaut or two. IT workers (like me) of a certain age can remember a similar problem when computers did not all run ANSI or, later, Unicode, which have robust symbol libraries. No, we had ASCII, which made for some interesting text-based artwork, but made formatting a pain in the broc. (Anglo-Saxon for ass.) 

By the time of Shakespeare, English had evolved into modern English, what we speak today. 

“Wait a minute. What about ‘How now?’ and ‘Thee’ and ‘Thou'”? 

I said it was modern English. I also said the dialect, commonly called Elizabethan, is only spoken in a few places now. The rules we know were pretty much solidified in this era. You can thank William Shakespeare. And John Milton (a Shakespeare uber-nerd.) And King James I of England (or King James VI of Scotland. They wouldn’t unite the thrones for another 2 centuries, just in time to import kings from Germany.) People notice the second-person pronouns more than anything else. This is because English still had formal and informal “you.” Your friends and neighbors are thee/thou, using thy or thine to show possession. The formal “you” also had “ye” (not to be confused with Anglo-Saxon “the” because… Reasons.)  As Britain, and subsequently America and Canada, moved away from the Catholic Church and even the Church of England, it also moved away from formality in the language. It just became easier to say you and yours. If you live in the American South, “y’all” is acceptable (as are the Yinzer “youins” and East Coast “youse”) for a plural of you. Some people even believe thee and thou are formal. Why? Well, the only place they see it is in the Bible. Just not in any translation since 1700.

The language is still evolving. Technology has accelerated verbing a brand name. We Xerox, even though Xerox is not the most common copier or printer anymore. Even in Bing and Duck Duck Go, we Google. And try as we might, those of us who have fled X, and quite a few who stayed behind, still “tweet.” Additionally, before it become a political hot potato, the language already began to accept “they” as gender neutral third person. Why? Calling someone “it” just makes you sound like a douchenozzle. (That is actually in at least one dictionary, and as both a hygiene device and an unlikeable person.) I ignore the political rancor over singular “they” because it lets me spike the football on my tenth-grade English teacher’s grave. That’s right. Suck it, Clara!

Ahem! I mean, sorry, Mrs. S.

*No, it’s not.

Grim ReaperI once read an email to another writer from a zine editor about how he handled manuscripts. “The first thing we do is cut. We cut and cut and cut.”

The more I edit, the more annoyed I get with that comment because that’s how the editor led his message. Editing does involve cutting, but bragging about it is not the best way to instill confidence in a writer. It reminded me of a college professor I had who bragged he failed 80% of his students. If you’re a college instructor doing your program’s capstone course, and 80% of your students fail, maybe you should consider another line of work. I look at editing the same way. 

Now, I’ve known my share of great editors over the years. Ellen Campbell (who gleefully calls herself “the Cutter,” but I’ll get to that in a minute), Jim Thomsen, and Stacy Robinson, my first and still only developmental editor. All three of them make suggestions. And they have good instincts when the writer will have anxiety over a change. Ellen, in particular, wants to be challenged. To her, that’s an opportunity to both teach the writer and learn something. 

But going back to my early days writing, I can recall a rather well-respected freelance editor who admitted she felt she had to be openly hostile to a manuscript. Two years into this job, and I still ask myself, “Why?” 

Of course, anyone who writes begins with the attitude of red ink and red track changes are “a dagger to the soul.” I’m not making that up. A would-be writer from my days of cosplay (when it was just weird grown-ups in costumes) said that as we made a go of a Klingon-themed fanzine. It’s fine in the beginning. We all get precious about our work. It’s our passion. But there comes a time where, if you’re serious, even if you’re just throwing books up on Amazon, you have to start shedding your artistic pretensions. Everyone thinks it’s cute when you walk around the house clutching the manuscript to that first novel, muttering, “My baby! My baby!” I did that, and I have a rather…complicated attitude toward my first novel. You also have to quit being precious about the prose. Sure, Anne Rice once openly bragged about how “Every word is perfect!” No, it’s not, Anne–May you rest in peace. I’ve read a couple of your books.

 

In his classic writing book, On Writing, Stephen King outlines what I’ve modeled for novels. First, write with the door closed. King says this is so you can focus on the story. Now, having been the inspiration for a couple of other writers, I can honestly say it’s also so your friends, relatives, and coworkers won’t kill you. Too many writers want everyone else to read excerpts from whatever they wrote today. No one wants to read an unfinished story because you haven’t finished it yet. Trust me, I got burned in the fanfic days for not having a long-ass trilogy fleshed out ahead of time. (I was a notorious pantser until I got into original scifi.)

King suggests cutting 10% of your first draft. Why? You’re throwing in everything because you don’t know what you need. I describe what I do in a copy edit as trimming the fat. In a dev edit or a story analysis, I trim a LOT of fat. But those changes are structural. In a copy edit, I look at it this way: Was is not your friend. Run-on sentences are bad. Droning on and on about some side detail just bores the reader. King is emphatic about zapping anything ending in “-ly.” Some editors get livid about describing eyes moving, though I’ve always found that to be more annoying than helpful. 

My personal pet peeve are the walk-ups, first pointed out to me by television writer and producer Lee Goldberg. Lee got annoyed when the star (and executive producer) of a show he wrote for insisted on “walk-ups” or “drive-ups.” Since this actor started out in sports, memorizing dialog was more of a challenge than, say, Henry Winkler, who made up a Shakespeare soliloquy on the fly when he forgot his lines in an audition. It was more training than skill as I recall the guy being a fair actor in action roles (and a couple of turns in comedy.) The star wanted scenes where his character drove to the scene, got out of his car, walked up to the door, and knocked. Like this explanation, the walk-ups took up a lot of space.  I’ve noticed them in quite a few manuscripts. 

Cutting is trimming the fat. Bragging about cutting is just showing what a bad ass you think you are to the writer. Cutting and explaining why you cut is in service to the reader and helpful to the writer. That 10% King talks about can be trimmed organically and without rancor. All hostility does is instill fear or a strong urge to get away from a person. If it’s the editor, trust me, they’re not going to have a lot of work. If it’s the writer, well, having a few diva moments of my own on that front, I can attest to the backlash you get for it. 

Robot readingI have something to tell you. It may be hard for you to hear, but as a potential client–mine or someone else’s–you need to hear this. Are you ready?

Editors are human.

There. I said it.

Oh, we may use software tools to do our jobs. Some of us rely solely on The Chicago Manual of Style or The Elements of Style or even the more recent and user-friendly Actually, The Comma Goes Here (Hat tip to Michael Bracken for revealing that one to me.) Some of us even edit by memorized rules and years of experience, an elite few even turning off spell check and grammar check. Ooooh!

Actually, even in the days of typed manuscripts and few or no computers, those last editors were freaks of nature. I’m pretty sure Stephen King’s editors or the great Ruth Cavin at St. Martin’s Press kept at least The Elements of Style and/or The Chicago Manual of Style handy.

But editors are human. I’ve caught mistakes by the best. I’ve been called out by a couple of authors of mine, one of whom requested me again, the other who gave me a blurb. They want the best prose possible. Hey, have you ever told your mechanic you want your car done a certain way after they did a job for you? If there’s a little back and forth, that mechanic knows what you want, and you just gave them a new way to fix your car. (Maybe a bad example. Unless you’re customizing, cars are pretty rigid.)

Every author has, or should have, a stet privilege. I’ve had three editors at Down & Out. The first had some bizarre preferences for style, like “a-m” instead of “AM” (my preference, and I usually try to tell an editor that up front) or the standard “a.m.” The others have been Chris Rhatigan, whose presence is missed by those of us on Down & Out’s roster of authors, and Dawn Barclay, whom I’ve also edited. I probably stetted more suggestions on Chris than Dawn, but both of them, at least as editors, hew pretty close to my editing style. In Chris’s case, he had to deal with more made-up place names than Dawn did.

I’ve had others, including beta readers, who did full-on edits. I had one, whom I hope dug his heels in and started editing himself, who tended to treat the rules as iron-clad. No passive voice. Absolutely everything shown, even the most irrelevant details. Especially because that was an independently published book, I stetted. No harm, no foul, because I knew more coming out of that set of revisions than I knew going in. I’ve had some where I’d end up spotting glaring errors in the final copy. (“Dude, did you even read this?”) Most of those were zine editors who couldn’t be arsed, to use a quaint English phrase, as they had a huge stack of submissions to go through. Most have been good.

But a few things editors have to deal with which you may be blissfully unaware as we carve up your manuscript:

  • We can’t memorize every grammar rule out there. Oh, we have the style guides and ProWritingAid/PerfectIT/etc. to highlight errors. Or we may be whizzes at trimming up prose and making it as lean as possible. But in the end, we’re not perfect.
  • The more errors in a manuscript, the more get past us. Really, if you have a ton of misspellings or misplaced commas or even run-ons and excess passive voice, we’re going to miss some errors simply because we’re busy fixing the last one. It’s human nature, and even software tools either don’t catch everything or, as I’ve discovered, you spend a lot of time smacking the tool’s hand. (“No, stupid, that’s a made-up name! Stop correcting it!” Note to ProWritingAid’s developers: Entity name suggestions desperately need a Disable Rule function. 90% of them are a waste of time, and the other 10%, most of us can spot it without an assist.) Plus, any editor worth his salt is going to use Track Changes or equivalent, which results in a lot of red text and commented passages. So that oddball tense change you stuck in the third sentence of the paragraph where I chopped up your run-on? Well, all that red ink and highlighting just camouflaged it. Sorry.
  • You’re not the only writer on our dance card. If you’ve hired a freelance editor, keep in mind they have other clients. Sometimes, you get lucky and hire someone new to the biz, when they’re cheap and available. A lot of times, when you make an inquiry, we get excited as soon as we know the estimated cost (because, hey, new business!), but just the same, we sweat how we’re going to properly slot your work between the current project and the one booked after yours. It’s not just the fee, it’s the time. And if you’re publishing for a small press or hiring someone who edits for one, projects come pretty much on a conveyor belt. The publisher has a schedule to keep, which means we have to stay on top of the workload. But you need proper attention. Otherwise, you wouldn’t hire us.
  • Developmental editing is always expensive. I paid about a grand to a dev editor (who taught me developmental editing. Bless you, Stacy. Bless you.) That was cheap, mainly because she was new. I charge roughly $2500 depending on initial word count (payment plans negotiable.) I’ll do a story analysis, which is like a dev edit but with only a light copy edit and without the workshopping sessions over chat or phone, just copious notes and an outline, for a fraction of that. Copy edits are based on word count, but there’s more wiggle room to negotiate.
  • Having mentioned money, it should still always be about the reader. You know. The people you want to buy your books. I don’t work with clients who lecture me about their genius or how this is going to upend the literary world. I’ve not only been that writer (that lasted about five minutes before I got put in my place), I dealt with one, who tuned around and sent me three of the most abusive emails anyone’s ever sent me. Blocked on email, social media, and even Paypal. I also know editors who edit for the sake of editing. Uh-huh. Let’s say you get a project from Jim Fusilli, a Wall Street Journal columnist whom I’ve edited. Well, actually, Jim is so good, I basically proofread, moving the odd comma around and chopping maybe one run-on sentence. Are you telling me you’re going to cut anyway because you cut on principle? Now you’re editing to edit, not editing for the reader, not helping the writer.
  • Don’t take it personally. You paid for someone’s expertise. Flawed or not, you should know more once you have all that red ink back than when you sent in the clean manuscript. If you disagree with something, ask the editor why they flagged what they flagged. Most of us are also writers. In fact, if we edit, we get some good conversations going. Dawn Barclay and I had some really good conversations ahead of her edits on my Jim Winter collection, Winter of Discontent. (Sorry, no release date yet.) Helps that I edited one of Dawn’s anthologies, so we knew each other’s thinking already.
  • One editor will always change what another editor did. I’ve done it. Dawn did it to me, as about 75% of Winter of Discontent came from webzines over the last 25 years. Some of the previous editors I still know. And I once carved up a novel that was a bestseller a decade ago (even won awards*.) He was one of those who gave me a blurb (and some very useful pushback.) I have to purge a contemporary reference from No Marigolds in the Promised Land and am contemplating moving Bad Religion and Road Rules to a new publisher. Quite likely, as I did most of the editing on those myself, I will go through each of them and yell, “Hottle, what the hell were you thinking?!?!” (And I will edit the day after writing this and scold myself for using “?!?!” So far, only Nathan Singer has resisted purging that, and you have to read Nathan to understand why.)

We’re human. But we’re usually as objective as we can be. The best of us ask, “How’s the reader going to see this?” If we do that, we’ve given you a filter to look at your own work. That’s what you hired us to do.

*But not a major award. Sadly, that author doesn’t have a leg lamp in his living room. Unless he bought it on Amazon or eBay.