Looking for a quick read for the little ones? Have a tablet? Shauna Scheets is offering the Kindle version of her first children’s book, Lappy the Rabbit Detective, for free this weekend. Click the link or cover to snag yourself a copy.
Bene scribete.
…wait a minute; why is it called The Little Mermaid? I mean, it’s been close to twenty years since I’ve seen the film (or read Hans Christian Anderson’s disturbing original story, for that matter), but I don’t seem to recall her being notably smaller than other mermaids.
Or her size being an issue in any sense, really.
Hmm.
Bene scribete.
This Halloween saw the release of Ascha, the first in a trilogy of prequels to Shauna Scheets‘s YA fantasy The Tower of Boran. Ascha gives us a glimpse into the early years of High Priestess Michaeyala (The Lady of the Crystal Veil of Boran lore) as she joins the titular character at T’Sala Un Sung – Caillte Saíocht’s premiere school for the study of magic – and sets in motion the events leading up to Seraetia’s adventure in the former book.
You can pick up Ascha in print, Kindle, or other eBook formats today.
As a prequel, it can be read with or without first picking up The Tower of Boran, but if you’d like to snag a copy of Boran along with it, now is a great time to do so, for it’s just been discounted to 99¢ on Kindle and Smashwords!
Happy reading.
Bene scribete.
/ˈzugmə/ | ZOOG-muh
Zeugma is a fun little device that occurs when a word is used in multiple contexts simultaneously – i.e., to mean two (or sometimes more) things at once as it applies separately to the other words in its purview. Mostly used for humorous brevity, it naturally requires that the word have some homonymous or polysemic properties.
Examples:
Bene scribete.
“Did someone leave their wallet in here?”
It’s not unusual to hear this sort of sentence in English. The sex of the subject (‘someone’) is unknown, so the speaker uses the pronoun ‘they’, even though the subject is not plural. Now, as a copyeditor (and otherwise general linguistic snob), I may be expected to rail against such usage, but alas – I am, in fact, about to do just the opposite.
The problem with this sort of construction is that English, like many languages, doesn’t have explicit fourth person* syntax, so any way we cast it becomes a sort of workaround. And, when it comes down to it, singular ‘they’ is simply the least ambiguous and awkward of a lot of bad options.
* (“What the #&@$ is fourth person!?” a non-super-language-nerd might ask. Well, I’m glad you did: a fourth-person entity is one that is unknown, generic, or irrelevant.)
Let’s take a moment to consider the alternatives.
So we’re left with ‘they’. It’s hardly ideal, but it’s cleaner than the other choices, and it’s used so often informally that it now sounds the most natural, and its meaning in context is immediately clear. Reusing plural terms for certain singular cases is not without precedent (we have only to look at the subjunctive form of “to be”), and ‘they’ is frequently used in other fourth-person constructions, anyway (“You know what they say.”).
Thus, while I’m not about to encourage anyone to start using singular ‘they’ in formal writing, I would advocate for a grammatical shift in that direction, if for no other reason than to be relieved of the constant need to convolute phrasing that avoiding it entails. (>^-‘)>
Bene scribete.
This person had the right idea.
Use them.
Bene scribete.
/ɛˈpɪstrəfi/ | eh-PISS-truh-fee
Epistrophe is the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of consecutive sentences or clauses (basically the converse of anaphora). Like its counterpart, it is mostly used for emphasis through poetic redundancy.
Examples:
Epistrophe. Use it.
Bene scribete.
It’s been a good week for the world of eBooks, with not just one, but two separate announcements – one from someone big, one from someone small – on new ways we’ll soon have to get these things on our devices.
Amazon’s MatchBook service, launching next month, is just the sort of thing I’ve been waiting for – buy a physical copy of the book, and get the digital one for free. Sensible enough, right? Well, actually, it’s buy the book in print and get the eBook for $2.99 or less, but I’m optimistic that publishers will eventually gravitate toward electing the free option. The film industry has done this with movies for a while now (DVDs and Blu-rays all seem to come with free digital downloads these days), and Amazon itself gives away free MP3s with CD purchases. It seems a little odd that books – far more basic than these other media types – are once again last to the party (and not even fully committed to complimentary yet), but as they say, it’s better late than never.
Naturally, the service is limited to Kindle eBooks, but Kindle applications are ubiquitous, and Amazon does have the largest library. Plus, as is the norm with the industry, B&N and others will likely soon enough follow suit. So I’d call it a good thing all around, and a smart move on Amazon’s part that will simultaneously support both print and digital media, keeping readers and publishers happy. I was even excited about the prospect of The Amber Ring being be a free download with the purchase of its paperback, until I quickly remembered that the Kindle version is free anyway… (>^-‘)>
Oyster – a much-anticipated “Netflix for books”, as it were – made its initial launch yesterday as an invite-only iPhone application, with open enrollment and support for other devices to come over time. For $9.95 a month, Oyster offers unlimited reading of any and all books in its library (100,000 and growing). HarperCollins is the only big house they’ve got on board to start with, but if they can secure one, and the service takes off, it’s not too hard to imagine that they will score others. For the meantime, it looks like they’re also happy to work with smaller presses and independent authors.
Again, with services like Netflix and Spotify having existed for years, it’s strange to think that it’s taken this long for anyone to adopt such a model with books, but here’s to hoping that it does as well as its counterparts!
Bene scribete.
/,æntɨ’mɛriə/ | AN-tih-MAIR-ee-uh
Antimeria is one of my favorite rhetoric devices. It is the application of a word outside of its lexical category – e.g., using an adjective as a noun or a noun as a verb (in this case also autologically called ‘verbing’!). Even with the words repurposed ad hoc, the missing semantics are filled in by context and their meaning is easily understood.
When particular uses become common enough, polysemes are born.
Examples:
Antimeria. Use it.
Bene scribete.
A few days ago, a friend of mine posted an article on Facebook concerning the use of the word ‘literally’ in the increasingly popular figurative sense. The article unfortunately seems to have disappeared at the moment, but the gist of it was pointing out that most dictionaries have now appended this alternate meaning to the word’s definition, and explaining that this usage may have originated with, or was at least first recorded in, Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (published in 1769).
Naturally, this sparked a conversation on whether or not this sort of language development is acceptable. Prior to encountering this, I had no idea there was even a movement to gain legitimacy for this non-literal use of ‘literally’, as it’s kind of the butt of diction jokes everywhere, but there are apparently many who feel that rejecting it (or any other semantic shift) amounts to needless linguistic authoritarianism.
My own take on the matter was as such:
The evolution of language and words is a natural, inevitable thing, and in the general case it is something to be embraced. That said, stability is a necessity of language’s functionality, thus any given modification cannot be assumed to possess intrinsic merit.
Language is a tool of communication, of which clarity is an important aspect, and I should assert that preserving its ability to convey meaning is a not an unworthy goal, particularly in an instance such as this wherein the suggested secondary interpretation of a term, when used in the same context, implies something strictly antithetical to what the accepted definition would. This dilution of precision, while admittedly neither entirely untenable nor without precedent, is nevertheless customarily unfavorable.
(That the word was used in this sense a few centuries ago scarcely argues its virtue – words have been used improperly since words were first words, and most such misuses do not incur a change in their respective societal perceptions!)
But, I’ll concede to being guilty of a little linguistic snobbery. People will say what they will, and language will be thus, regardless of what may or may not be in its own best interest. (>^-‘)>
I’m curious to hear where others lie on the issue, though. Any thoughts to add?
Bene scribete.
Writin' Fish 