Tonight I'm planning to work on a novella written by my building manager (of all things!). I've completed about half of it and I'm pleased that he's not a bad writer. It's much more pleasant to work with writers who know how to put together a sentence than the ones who don't and call it their "style," or people who simply don't know the difference between good and bad writing because they never paid much attention to the rules. All those rules! And so complicated!
Well, yes. English complicated, but it is also capable of expanding to infinity, something like pi. Words come and go in popularity, but English can always make room for more. We have no shame about adopting words from other languages and giving them our own, Americanized pronunciation. We aren't particular about foreign and domestic words, and as they join our everyday speech, we use them with pleasure and enthusiasm. We even invent words that never existed before someone in our country said them: no Greek roots, no Latin roots, no French or Middle English roots. Just words that came from us but within a short time we all understand and use them.
Yet there are rules. Some words must be spelled correctly or they mean something quite different from what the speaker or writer intended. Those are the words people have problems with and why spelling is so very important, even for a made-up word like Blam!
I once worked with an author who insisted that the thing over his fireplace was a mantle. The copy editor had changed it to mantel. Every time I saw a new stage of proof, the author insisted on restoring his original version, and with increasing exasperation and many exclamation points, demanded his preferred spelling. I trotted around the his editor's office and explained that the thing over the fireplace was a mantel, while a great sweeping cloak was a mantle. In context, his spelling made no sense. She agreed with me, but what could she do? Finally I told her that I would not leave a spelling error in the book, and somehow I also learned that this author tended to overindulge in alcoholic beverages, so when the book went to press, the correct spelling was in place. Strangely enough, the author did not write a letter accusing us of duplicity for spelling the word correctly. One of those mysteries of publishing that remains unsolved to this day.
For people who are self-publishing, things are more complicated. For instance, if you decide you want your chapter numbers spelled out and you haven't checked with the Chicago Manual of Style to see how to handle the upper/lowercase problem that exits in the decision, you may find yourself spelling them like this: Chapter Twenty-One, Chapter Thirty-Two, and so on. The problem here is that twenty-one, thirty-two, and ninety-nine are all permanently hyphenated compound words: two words that equal one thing. So they need to be capped only at the first letter: Chapter Twenty-one, Chapter Thirty-three, and so on.
(Tomorrow I'm going to write a special section on publishing terms—where they came from, what they mean, and why a computer is not a typewriter; it's a typesetting machine. For now, just hang in there. I think you'll get the meaning from the context of the sentence you're reading.)
Compound words are one of the most complex subjects in spelling. When is a word a compound, when not; when is it a temporary hyphenated compound; when is it a permanent hyphenated compound [Hint: Use the dictionary!]? Why permanent? Why temporary? And what about words that were once permanently hyphenated only to morph into completely closed up words (such as lifestyle)? Frankly, I think it's such a complicated subject that I'm not going to tackle it in one blog entry. Over the coming weeks, I'm planning to devote individual entries to discussing them.
For tonight, I'm doing that real work to help this budding author improve his prose. Good luck to anyone who reads this post and forages ahead, through the spelling jungle our language creates. Have fun. May the Force be with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment