Homophobia Taken to Ridiculous Extremes

So Tim Torkildson was hired to do social media for the Nomen Global Language Center, a school that serves primarily people learning English as a foreign language. Part of his job was writing the school's language blog. He did a post about homophones, and was fired.

Seriously.

Torkildson's boss, Clarke Woodger, who owns the school, called him in and fired him.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune:

When the social-media specialist for a private Provo-based English language learning center wrote a blog explaining homophones, he was let go for creating the perception that the school promoted a gay agenda.

...

As Torkildson tells it, Woodger said he could not trust him and that the blog about homophones was the last straw.

"Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality," Woodger complained, according to Torkildson, who posted the exchange on his Facebook page.

I have to ask, how ignorant does someone have to be to think homophones have anything at all to do with homosexuality? And how ignorant about language can you be and still own a language school? I think the answer to both questions is, pretty darned ignorant.

Techdirt says:

Torkildson's account includes some eyebrow-raising quotes of Woodger claiming not to know what homophones were, claiming that they don't teach that kind of "advanced" language study to their English language students, and worrying that the post would associate the school with homosexuality for reasons uknown to this writer.

So the difference between "there" and "their," or "to," "too" and "two" is an advanced concept? Umm, sure. 'Cause I totally didn't get that in first grade. Since a lot of simple, basic words are homophones, I would expect this to be taught to foreign students very early in their English studies, because it's going to be darned confusing if it's not explained.

About the only positive thing I can say here is that this isn't a public school -- they get enough bad press, and usually deserve it. But the private side apparently isn't immune to idiocy either.

Hopefully Mr. Torkildson will find another job soon, working for someone who has a functional brain. Best of luck, Mr. Torkildson.

Angie

I'm Back! WorldCon Part 1

WorldCon in Reno was a lot of fun, and one of the best run conventions I've attended. I've worked almost 50 conventions and conferences, so I can often spot problems from the front of the house. I didn't spot anything here; even the Masquerade and Hugo Ceremony both started within a few minutes of their scheduled times, which is pretty amazing. :) I got to hang with friends, went to more panels than I usually go to in half a dozen conventions, and generally had a great time.

Jim and I flew in on Tuesday, got our badges, and had the evening free to relax and check out the program schedule before things officially started on Wednesday. We stayed at the Atlantis, the main convention hotel, which is attached to the convention center with a (very very) long skyway. It was quite a hike from our room to the panels and such at the CC, but I was happy not to have to walk outside, where the temperatures were distinctly uncomfortable, especially for someone who's become acclimated to Seattle weather. Although in contrast with the heat outside, looking out the skyway windows we could see the hills above Reno, and one of them still had snow on it. O_O Wow. Reno itself is about four thousand feet up, so the top of that hill (which is probably a mountain, officially) is probably a mile up or close to it; that must be why the shaded slopes were still snowy. Still, it's an odd sight in the northern hemisphere in August, especially when one is wishing for more AC.

The first panel I attended was the most useful -- Mary Robinette Kowal, who's a puppeteer and voice actor as well as a writer, did a panel called "Giving an Effective Reading." It was opposite the Opening Ceremony, but it was a wonderful panel and I'm very glad I went. I thought I had a general idea of reading aloud -- I'd done it in school, after all, as I'm sure everyone has -- but I was still nervous about my ability to read my own work in front of an audience.

She started with story selection, looking at things like the number of characters, the way the language lends itself to interpretive reading, and making sure your selection is a complete whole, even if it's a chunk of some larger story. When she got into using the voice like an instrument, Ms. Kowal had us go through a number of exercises, demonstrating different aspects of voice, including things I'd never heard of or thought about, like the placement of your voice -- which part of your mouth resonates when you're speaking. This was very ?? when she first described it, but the results were cool.

The panel was less than an hour long so she sort of rushed through a number of topics, but she has a great collection of posts on reading aloud on her blog. Highly recommended for any writer who might want to read their work to an audience. Hint: Don't wait till the night before to click through the link. :)

That's a good wrap for now -- more next time. [wave]

Angie

A Wonderful Play on Language

How I Met My Wife -- This is today's Jumbo Joke, but it's not really a joke per se. It's a wonderful play on language, originally published in the New Yorker, according to a note on the site. It begins:

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.

I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.

Definitely read the rest. :)

Angie

Writing Advice

A lot of bloggers are commenting on the collections of Rules for Writing the Guardian UK posted.

My favorites are the first one by AL Kennedy:

1 Have humility. Older/more ­experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. ­Consider what they say. However, don't automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.

and the tenth by Michael Moorcock:

10 Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.

I think that's what it comes down to, especially with all the many "don't" rules which pepper the lists. Don't use adverbs, ever. Don't use any speaking verb but "said" and even that one sucks. Using similes or metaphors, ever, is so bad you should be embarassed. Don't this, that or the other thing, ever-ever! Obviously some successful writers subscribe to these rules, and find them useful, but if everyone followed them, everyone's work would look and sound exactly alike.

Kudos to the writers who acknowledged that there are exceptions, and that different writers are different, and that that's okay.

My first rule: Anyone who says they have an unbreakable writing rule, or a method or approach which Every Real Writer must follow for success, is full of shit.

Angie

A Reading Advantage?

Stewart has a recent post up about whether writers can also act, in the context of reading their own dialogue and such. This reminded me of something from my writing youth [cough] and since it's not really relevant to his post, I'm putting it here.

Twenty-some years ago I was in a (realspace) writing workshop and this one woman participant was a very expressive reader. I found her too slow and annoying to listen to for that reason, but she "did" voices very expressively. A lot of the workshop's writers thought she was just wonderful and wanted her to read their stories for the group (the workshop format was to have stories or chapters read right then and there, and then commented on) because her reading made the stories sound better.

I tried to argue that this was a reason not to have her read their stories. The whole point of being in the workshop was to focus on the writing, its good and bad points, and how it could be made better. If the person reading the story is so actor-y that the focus is on the voices and the characters as expressed by the voices, rather than on the writing itself, then that makes it harder to concentrate on the words as they appeared on the page, and give proper criticism.

Of course, I was ignored and a number of people had this woman reading their work for the next few months. Whatever.

But there are going to be times when a vibrant show of lively talent really isn't what you're looking for. If a story has been published and you're doing a reading for prospective buyers to try to persuade them that said story is wonderful and delightful and worthy of their money and time, then getting a really excellent reader to do the performance is probably to your benefit. In a workshop environment, though, where the purpose is to focus on the words and only the words, allowing distractions (no matter how entertaining) is counterproductive. The bare words are what you want in that sort of situation, and if they come across as boring then you need to know that ASAP, not have it masked by a character-actor of a reader.

Angie

Summiting Everest

Everyone and their brother-in-law around the writing-related blogoverse has been posting or linking to this cartoon, and yeah, it can be true, but sometimes it's not. It depends on the skill of the writer, really, as do so many things.

You can be an Anne McCaffrey and make up a lot of words and names which fit your world well and are internally consistent in their tone, derivation, etc., and incorporate them very smoothly into your text such that the reader is never confused about what's what. Or you can be a JR Ward whose made-up words and names sound like she hit up a local junior high for suggestions, only use your own made-up rules when you feel like it, and just toss the new vocabulary into your text however so your readers are always going, "Huh??" and having to flip to the glossary. Credit to her for putting a glossary in her books, and for putting it at the front of the book so you know it's there right when you start, but seriously, the Black Dagger Brotherhood books are an advanced course in how not to make up words and names, and how not to use them in a piece of fiction.

But it depends. It's one of those things which is very easy to mess up, so many writers do and many readers remember the trainwrecks. But the problem isn't with the concept of making up words; it's with the writers and how they do it. There are a lot of aspects of fiction writing -- including many of the subgenres and plot devices and techniques and whatnot which get massive snarking -- which really aren't problematic in and of themselves, but rather which are difficult to do well and so are rarely done well.

But it's like waxing sarcastic about Everest expeditions, just because 99.9% of the people on the planet don't have the skills or resources to actually make the summit. High-end mountain climbing isn't stupid; people who try to do it when they aren't prepared to do it successfully are stupid. Or maybe they're just still learning. But don't blame the mountain if most of the people who try to climb it end up failing. (At least with writing, failure rarely means death.)

I think deciding whether to try a new or difficult device or technique is one of those areas where a writer has to be brutally honest with him- or herself. It's easy to say, "Oh, I've seen this done, so I can do it too." Or "Well, I know a lot of people say you shouldn't do this, but Chris Awesomewriter did it and it was great so what do they all know?" It's harder, though, to make an honest assessment of whether your particular skills are up to the task. Am I honestly as good as Chris Awesomewriter? If not, maybe I should back off on using that one device Chris used to such good effect, but which a hundred other writers have crashed and burned on.

Which isn't to say one should never try new things. I try new techniques and plot devices and character types and narrative voices all the time; it's one of the reasons I have so many WIPs on my hard drive. I just don't share them all, because I've developed a decent sense of when something's working and when it's not.

There's something to be said for a practice piece, or what an artist would call a study. Labelling something as being For Practice means the pressure is off. You don't have to worry about whether it'll work or whether it'll be perfect or whether that train will wreck and take the station with it. If it's just an experiment, then you're free to fail and to learn from the failure and go on to the next piece.

I get uncomfortable, though, when something as basic as making up new vocabulary for an SF or fantasy story is mocked and held up as something which makes a story suck. Only bad writing can make a story suck.

The best way to become a writer who doesn't suck is to practice a lot, try new things, and learn from your failures. Maybe after three or four or a dozen failed expeditions you'll finally make the summit, while the folks who carefully avoid everything that's difficult and therefore prone to failure never make it past the foothills.

Angie

Abuse of Typography

Is it just me or is this getting worse? Some of this stuff makes me wonder when the writer is going to be graduating from high school.

Dear Writer:

Calling your characters "Wharrior" and "Frehnzy" doesn't make your story cool. Neither does a reference to a "childe" or a "songe" unless your story is set in a period when that spelling was used. "Sylvyr" and its permutations don't impress me either. Spell things correctly. If you want to be different, use foreign names, or for SF and fantasy you can make something up from scratch. The universe should charge a nickel -- per letter, multiplied by the number of copies of the book/story printed -- for every extraneous "H" and "E" and for every "Y" pasted on where another vowel should be.

Apostrophes, linguistically, indicate a glottal stop. If that's not what you want, don't use them. Anne McCaffery gets a pass because her dragon riders actually shortened their names when they got their dragons, so her apostrophes indicated legitimate contractions. If your word isn't a contraction and doesn't have a glottal stop, leave the apostrophes out. Names like "Jo'nathan" or "T'revor" don't look cool. Making up a name doesn't help -- if you pronounce "Lerin'elia" the same way you'd pronounce "Lerinelia," leave out the apostrophe. And seriously, there are so many writers nowadays who think throwing in a pointless apostrophe is just too cool that even if you do mean to indicate a glottal stop in the middle there, most people will assume you're a teenager trying to sound cool anyway.

Capitalizing a blah noun won't make it any less blah. If your character is carrying the Cup, the Candle and the Flask into the Hall where the Warrior will perform the Ceremony, you need to go back and rethink a few things. If something is that special, it'll probably have a name. Think of one and then use it. If it's not, then it doesn't require a capital, so don't use one.

Caveat: if you're using a chunk of a longer proper name, you can capitalize that. So for example, I'm from the United States of America, and calling it "the States" is legitimate because "States" is part of a proper noun. Having your hero wield "the Sword," though, just makes me eyeroll unless you told me earlier that it's actually "the Barliman Sword of Truth" or whatever.

Putting an English word into italics doesn't make it sound foreign. If your character speaks a foreign language -- either a realspace language or one you've made up for your SF or fantasy book -- then either use that language with italics or translate it into English without italics. English in italics just makes it look like you're going through the text with a hilighter, marking the cool parts for us so we know they're cool. It doesn't work.

Yes, I've been reading. This has been bugging me more and more recently, and I just ran across Nathan Bransford's post on readers' pet peeves. My comment got kind of long [cough] so I brought it back here.

I'm expecting to see a Syl'vyr Childe named Cuhr'se wander through the Door with an engraved Knife any time now. [headdesk]

Angie

OK, This Is Just Freaky

Check out this article in Wikipedia. It's about a particular linguistic oddity....

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs.

I had to keep reading and squint for a while before I got what it's saying, but yeah, it does work. That doesn't make it any less freaky, though, LOL!

I love stuff like this. :)

Angie