Vowel Movements

[steepholm]

I dislike shibboleths - or rather, I like to think of myself as someone who dislikes them, but actually I like them more than most (I'm complex and interesting, you see).

There's no doubt that they save time, at least. Any discussion of children's literature that misspells "Streatfeild" is cast into outer darkness without further consideration, no shriving time allowed. I feel almost as strongly about "minuscule". I was able to read through the Harry Potter series with equanimity largely because Rowling (who's very fond of the word) never misspelt it - or if she did, it was caught by the Bloomsbury house elves as surely as a Golden Snitch in the hand of a Gryffindor Seeker. That counts for a lot.

Yet, when it comes to "onomatopoeia" and its many variations, I'm very forgiving, feeling in my bones that to ask for more than three vowels in a row is just not English, damn it!

I'm complex, see, just like I said.

Comments

[deborah]

I've had to learn, in discussions of children's literature, to be forgiving of people who think that Tim Wynne-Jones and Diana Wynne Jones are alphabetized next to each other, simply because if I didn't forgive those people than half of children's literature would be disqualified.

[steepholm]

Ah, very true! Ditto those who put Jill Paton Walsh next to David Walliams.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

An old friend of ours lives in a street named 'Hatfeild Mead' and yes, it's spelled that way on the street sign and in the local directory :oZ

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Judging from past experience, if I ever use the name Streatfeild in an essay, I'll spell it correctly but the copy editors will "correct" it, and then I'll get blamed.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

A friend referred in an essay on Ezra Pound to "Mussolini's fascism." It came back queried by the copy editor: "Isn't 'fascism' a little strong?"

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That - is as hilarious as fascism gets!

It's also a great example of what we might call the zombification of words, when their literal meaning is taken over by a dead metaphor: "Lourdes has become a Mecca for tourists"; "Daimler - the Rolls Royce of cars", etc.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Miller Beer, in the USA anyhow, used to be advertised as "The Champagne of bottled beer," so the inevitable joke was to refer to Dom Perignon as "the beer of bottled Champagne."

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I got told off at a private view of Futurist art for referring to F T Marinetti as a fascist................

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Wow.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

"Like I said." :)

I really like The Hunger Games, but God Almighty who copyedited it? I mean it's not only that Suzanne Collins' usage is precarious, it's that any copyeditor should know to change the obvious and repeated errors. ("She followed him and I into the room." "I take a drink of water and lay down." Things like that.)

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I've officially given up on expecting published works to get lay and lie and may and might grammatically correct. I'm still holding out on less vs fewer.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I haven't read The Hunger Games: are those real examples? Because they're in first person, which is privileged speech. You wouldn't correct Huck Finn for saying "I had to lay down" unless he'd used lie/lay correctly everywhere else (and then you'd probably query).

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

They're from memory but real. I agree with you that first person is privileged speech if there's any indication of an attempt to communicate a voice. Here she systematically uses "lay" as first person present for "lie," but doesn't make any other related errors and the "him and I" error occurs only twice I think. So it's very hard to believe that this is meant to catch some idiosyncrasy of the narrator's voice, which is otherwise almost always standard English.

There's an interesting issue, that The Hunger Games brings up in another way bit that your connects with your comment, viz., the extent to which a (fashionably) present tense narrative can also claim the privilege of idiosyncratic speech. The historical present, unless it's being used very precisely to conform to the way it's used in real speech ("So I says..." "So I'm like...."), won't generally tolerate non-standard English because, paradoxically enough, it already announces itself as artifice and not spontaneous effusion.

That is, with the historical present we get a stronger distinction between narrative agency and the character the first person pronoun refers to. "I am sitting in my room when my mother comes in" distinguishes very strongly between the "I" sitting in her room and the "I" now narrating this incident. Imitating non-standard usage under those circumstances clashes with the effect of the historical present.

I'm not saying it can't happen. I think (iirc) that Norman Rush does it pretty well in Whites. But it's not what's happening in The Hunger Games.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

"I am sitting in my room when my mother comes in" distinguishes very strongly between the "I" sitting in her room and the "I" now narrating this incident. Imitating non-standard usage under those circumstances clashes with the effect of the historical present.

Wow, it wouldn't even have occurred to me to call that the historical present. I think of the first-person-present schtick (which I usually hate) as a device to make you think that you've got access to the person's own camera-like point of view, and that it attempts to sound even more intimate than ordinary first person. Hence if anything I would expect more of an attempt to establish a personal voice. It would be interesting to know whether some authors are thinking of it my way and some yours, and very likely other ways we haven't thought of.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Well, one of the things that I find interesting about The Hunger Games is that it brings out (by contrast) how the FPPS (first-person-present-schtick) is almost always a historical present disguised as immediacy of point of view. Or to be more precise about it, the narrator narrating is presenting what the narrator acting has done in the historical present. Because the same pronoun applies to both, the historical present becomes all the more vivid. But the point of the historical present is to minimize one of the paramaters of distance and give part of the sense of immediacy. Usually the distance is sustained enough by the other distinction between narrator narrating and narrator acting.

By violating this tacit rule of FPPS she highlights them. That is to say, there are things she does that you realize FPPS usually avoids, and you see why. An example (again from memory: I have not the books about me). When Chuck Palahniuk's unnamed narrator says at the beginning (and several times afterwards) in Fight Club:

I know this because Tyler Durden knows this

that first "know" or probably it would be better to say that "know because" refers to true knowledge, knowledge that the narrating narrator endorses. But Katniss in The Hunger Games frequently says "I know that he is pretending" when it later turns out that this is false: he wasn't pretending, and so she didn't know that he was.

And that's what strikes us (after you read a lot of the book) as not quite conforming to our intuitions of narrative grammar. Generally what philosophers call the propositional attitudes (know, believe, doubt, hope and so on) are supposed to conform to the attitudes of the narrator narrating, not the narrator acting in the moment.

Some can be finessed. I once wrote a sudden fiction based on what's called Moore's paradox (after George Moore). Moore says that there's something wrong with saying "It is raining but I don't think so." But that's not a logical contradiction. You can see that because if you change the tense: "It was raining but I didn't think so," there's no problem at all. Likewise you can change the person: "It is raining but she doesn't think so."

But I think "It is raining but I don't think so" is okay in an FPPS (that's what my sudden fiction was about). "It is raining but I don't think so. When I go outside and get drenched, I realize that I am wrong."

What I don't think works is: "I know she is lying, but she isn't." That has to be: "I think I know she is lying, but she isn't." So I sentence like "I know she is lying" when five pages later it turns out she isn't (and that's the sort of thing Collins does), really doesn't seem to be playing fair, even by the rules of FPPS. But if she'd written "I think I know she is lying" or "I am sure she is lying" or "I think she is lying" that's a strong giveaway that she isn't. So FPPS has to deal with certain constraints imposed on it by the propositional attitudes. Collins ignores those, or she ignores them very frequently, and the way that feels wrong is really interesting.

I completely agree that it would be interesting to look at a whole range of examples. But this is something I've paid attention to for a while, and I really haven't seen anyone else do what Collins does. She may be doing it intentionally and subtly, but to this reader it seems a weakness (as does the occasional bad grammar) in an otherwise really artful book.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Seems to me people often say they "know" when they mean they're sure of something, not that they can't possibly be wrong. I don't see why that would be any different in first person present tense. It might be difficult to express without confusing the reader, but that's a different problem.

I think I'm missing something in your analysis, because I still don't get why one would assume that the narrator narrating would be different from the narrator acting. I thought the whole point was that they weren't, that you'd be riding behind their eyes, so to speak.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Well, we may have different intuitions here, though it's helping me to have this convo with you. My intuition is that people don't narrate as they're acting, and don't know that we're reading, so that subtle aspects of a narrator's relation to her character-as-agent are brought out in what feel like Collins's somewhat misformulations (in my opinion). I can't think of any other place where a present tense first person narrator has ever said that she knows something which turns out not to be true in the fiction where she says she knows it.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I found a Horn Book essay that talks about these issues: http://www.hbook.com/2011/12/opinion/present-tensions-or-its-all-happening-now/

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I gather you deleted your comment, but the link came through and I read Deirdre Baker's interesting article. Thank you for pointing me to it.