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This is number eighty-six in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THE HARDEST THING I DO is sit down in front of an empty page. From my conversations with other authors, I’m not unusual in that. We get this great idea for a story—maybe even draft an outline, but then we have to sit in front of a blank page and actually write the damn story.
Oh! Forget about the story! I just need to get the first sentence out! In fact, it would be helpful if I had a title. Just so I could write something at the top of the page.
When I talk to fans and readers, I often hear, “I’ve got a great idea for a story!” When I suggest they write it, it’s typically followed by, “I just don’t have any inspiration when I sit down to write.”
Wrong word. You have the inspiration. You simply aren’t willing to do the actual hard work of writing. When I talk about how many books I’ve written or how many words a year I write, people often give a little snort and say, “Yeah, but you don’t have a life.”
Maybe that’s true. I don’t write for a living; I write to live. I don’t feel right if I’m not working on a project.
In November of 2019, I wrote the first draft of A Place at the Table for my November novel. I was pretty pleased, though I knew it would be one of the books that would require a 90% rewrite from the original draft. I tried to enjoy the holiday season, even heading down to Oklahoma to see a woman I thought was my girlfriend. She said she liked older guys, but when she came to visit me up north, I nearly died. I don’t think she was thinking about that old! So, by Christmas, I was sitting in my trailer in an RV park near Tulsa, thinking about life and funny things that had happened.
During the summer, I’d been sitting with friends at the weekly social hour at Sun Meadow Family Nudist Park when the subject of how we became nudists came up. My friend Doug started in on a tale about freedom and lack of body shaming, then suddenly quieted and said, “The truth is, I just like boobs. Don’t tell my wife I said that.”
Next to him, his wife lifted her prodigious boobs and said, “As if I didn’t know.”
I started thinking that if Doug hadn’t told his wife that little bit of information, what else might a guy never tell his wife? And the title Things I Never Told My Wife crept into my mind. I set it aside as I worked on my November novel, but as Christmas came and went, I started toying with it more seriously, making a list of things he might never mention.
But there I was, sitting in front of a blank page with just a title in front of me. And then it came to me:
I met my soulmate when I was sixteen years old.
Of course, I never told my wife about that.
I ‘broke the page’ and was off and running. I pounded out the 82,000 words in thirty days. My editors were apparently as hungry for something to work on as I was because they shoveled the chapters back to me as fast as I could get them rewritten and sent off. I released the book on February 10, 2020 on SOL and on the 16th on Bookapy.
According to my logs, I was spending eight to ten hours a day most days in front of my computer writing, editing, rewriting, and getting the story ready. That was while I was traveling for four weeks through Oklahoma and Texas.
No life? Who says?
Things I Never Told My Wife is available as an eBook on Bookapy.
In talks I’ve given at writing events and conferences, I’ve often told aspiring novelists that the difference between a writer and a non-writer is that writers sit their butts in a seat and write.
Or as Red Grange reportedly said in the 1940s, “Writing is simple. You just sit at a typewriter and open a vein.”
Indeed, I’ve bled on a number of pages, and the results weren’t always pretty. Somehow, I keep getting excited about the next project.
Which brings me to the next project I’m working on—my November novel for 2024.
Getting the idea to write a modern take on the myth of Sisyphus was truly the easy part. I’ve always enjoyed mythology and have riffed on different themes in other works. They always require a fair amount of research and preparation, so I’ve been working on this for the better part of a month. But my first outline missed the mark significantly. That’s because I didn’t really understand who the
mythical character of Sisyphus was. My editor, Old Rotorhead, was not impressed with the outline and said my character sounded like a narcissistic sociopath.
Definitely not fun to write or read about.
So, I went back to the myths to try to compile a good picture of what this Greek anti-hero was really like. Most of us know that Sisyphus was condemned to push a rock up a mountain, but every time he neared the top, the rock would break loose and roll back to the bottom. He had to start over. But why?
As Rotorhead told me, the Olympian gods didn’t punish people for being bad, but for hubris, acting or presuming above their station. Indeed, I found evidence of multiple instances in which Sisyphus—apparently acting in the best interest of his city—went up against Zeus. He was known to have murdered guests, in contradiction to Zeus’s law of hospitality. That got Zeus mad, but not quite enough to punish Sisyphus.
But Zeus had a wandering eye, and when he abducted the nymph Aegina and had his way with her, her father, the river god Asopus, came hunting for her. Sisyphus was attempting to build a temple and fortress at the top of the Corinthian acropolis, but there was no water there. He traded the information of where Zeus had taken Aegina in return for Asopus creating a spring on top of the acropolis so it would have water.
That really pissed Zeus off and after chasing Asopus back where he came from, he ordered Death to take Sisyphus to Tartarus and chain him there forever.
Quick-thinking Sisyphus tricked Death into showing him how the chains worked by chaining Death to the rock. Then Sisyphus returned to the living. That was an affront to both Zeus and to Hades.
Years later, when Sisyphus once again died, he tricked Persephone into letting him return to the land of the living to remind his wife of her duties to her dead husband. Let’s say Sisyphus seduced Hades’ wife, which really ticked off the god of the underworld.
When it finally came to the attention of the gods that Sisyphus was still running around in the land of the living, Hermes was sent to drag him before Hades and Zeus for judgment. That’s what resulted in the punishment.
I’ve followed the writings of Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus” and have interpreted his punishment as living life over and over again, but always dying in the end.
The first line to break the page was “Another day, the same old rock.”
Now to write the rest of the book.
You can join my Sausage Grinder tier patrons on Patreon for just $10 per month. These patrons receive daily updates on the progress of this story as I write it. The updates are raw and unedited, and allow the patrons to read the story as it unfolds from my mind. It’s not always pretty, but it’s fun. Next week: “Writing Was the Easy Part.”
This is number eighty-five in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WHERE DO YOU GET IDEAS? I just have no inspiration!”
I’ve published seventy books to date. I’ve never completely run out of ideas. But much better authors than I have attempted to answer or not answer the question regarding where ideas come from.
Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote: “It is different in every writer, and in many of us it is different every time.” –Dancing at the Edge of the World.
Neil Gaiman in a Q&A following his 2011 Interview at the Wheeler Center said, “For me, inspiration comes from a bunch of places: desperation, deadlines… A lot of times ideas will turn up when you’re doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence — they come from two things flowing together.”
In an interview at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, host Paul Holdengraber asked Director David Lynch where ideas come from. Lynch was far more vague: “An idea comes — and you see it, and you hear it, and you know it…”
Musician-songwriter Leonard Cohen in Song-Writers on Song-Writing had a great answer to the question: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.”
Of course, my own answer to the question is “All of the above.” I find ideas absolutely everywhere.
When I was searching for an idea for Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) November novel in 2007, inspiration came in the form of a five-year-old girl at a health club. I’d finished my workout and was waiting for my wife and daughter to emerge. That day, I was wearing a sweatshirt with a very stylized greyhound graphic, in honor of Valsora, our rescued greyhound. The little girl in the lobby was fascinated by the graphic and continually pointed at it.
“This is a greyhound dog,” I said. “They are very nice dogs and I own one.”
The little girl’s face fell.
“Oh. I thought it was a dragon,” she said.
Inspiration hit me square in the face. How about if I wrote a story about a hapless dragonslayer who didn’t know what a dragon looked like, where it lived, or how to slay it? Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, my dragonslayer would constantly mistake a duck, a melon farmer’s bag, a tinker’s cart, and others for a dragon, always excusing himself from the damage he did by saying, “I thought it was a dragon.”
Who would make a good dragonslayer? The only one most people have heard of by name is St. George. I won’t write about the saint, but it’s possible that if people saw the name Steven abbreviated Stn. George, they would mistake Steven for Saint.
Thus, the initial concept for Steven George and The Dragon was born.
At that point, I needed a story to go with the concept. Inspiration is never enough. It needs to be followed with the work of actually writing the book. I’ll talk about that next week.
Steven George and The Dragon and the sequel, Steven George and the Terror, are available as a set or individual eBooks on Bookapy.
Inspiration for stories has come from many sources, not all as glamorous as being mistaken for a dragon. In 2013, I was working with a committee organizing the entries into the PNWA Writer’s Competition. We were talking about how people had a difficult time deciding what genre they were writing in, and often mashing two or more together.
As a joke, I said, “Next year I think I’ll write an Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventure.” The words were no sooner spoken than the idea sprang full grown from the head of Zeus. I began writing Redtail. It would be the story of a contemporary teenage cowboy who travels back in time to become his own ancestor and solve a 20th century mystery with information from the past.
It was not the first time I was hit by inspiration. Sometimes it was intentional.
I’d gone through a particularly dark period of my life and the response of my readers at SOL had pulled me out of the depression, encouraging me to keep writing. I decided I wanted to write something especially for those readers and assembled a list of characteristics they seemed to like. Things other than just sex. I found they wanted a long story—I am still getting comments regarding some of my stories not being long enough. They wanted a strong, heroic lead, but he needed to be an underdog of sorts. He needed to have a gift—preferably some kind of artistry—and some athletic ability. He would have multiple girlfriends who all loved each other as much as they loved him. And he must be willing to lay his life on the line to protect them.
Easy. I had all the elements, but no story.
I was driving along the Gulf of Mexico in Alabama listening to 60s and 70s music, as I often did, when I heard the 1975 hit by Smokie play: “Living Next Door to Alice.” My hearing was already starting to fail by that time of my life and I often misunderstood lyrics anyway, but I heard the title Living Next Door to Heaven.
Thus, was born my longest work to date at ten volumes and over two million words. (Three volumes on SOL.) The story was my top downloaded and top scoring story on SOL, thanks to those same readers who had buoyed me up when I’d been depressed.
Inspiration is all around us. It is nearly time for me to start my next November novel. I’ve been looking for a subject or title. I happen to like mythology, especially where I can add my own twist. I’ve done it with the book Pygmalion Revisited and The Props Master Series. I even made a list of myths that I’d like to address at one point or another. Prometheus, Cupid and Psyche, The Golden Fleece, Persephone and Hades, to name a few.
As I was looking at that list recently, I came across the "Myth of Sisyphus." Interestingly, Albert Camus wrote an essay about the myth and his existentialist assessment that lost hope led to despair, which led to suicide. It is only when people realize the absurdity of life that they are content to live, go to work, follow the same routine, accomplish the same amount, and commute home to the same life, day after day, that they are freed from the hopelessness of living. It is simply an absurdity.
And thus, the idea for my November novel this year was born. I will be writing about a reincarnation of Sisyphus, interpreting his rock as being daily life in an absurd world. Oddly enough, happy about it.
You can follow the development of the story with daily posts in the month of November by becoming a Sausage Grinder Patron of Devon Layne. And I will continue regular posts until the story is finished, should I not reach the end by November 30. Yes, there will be sex in the story, but the story of Sisyphus is not about the sex. It boldly declares: "Life is not a punishment; it is the reward."
Next week, my blog post will be about what goes on after the inspiration has hit. That’s when the real work begins and the “Perspiration.”
This is number eighty-four in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“GOOD NEWS, LENA,” said Ole. “I bought a condominium!”
“That’s wonderful,” answered Lena. “Now I can throw away the diagram!”
What a wonderful, rich vocabulary we have when it comes to a play on words. When one person can misunderstand another fluently, it is even better.
I read a work on SOL by a very popular and fine author, now deceased, titled Thunder and Lightening. I cringed a little. Of course, the author meant ‘lightning,’ I thought to myself. But the story by Lazlo Zalezac had a 9.03 rating and I wasn’t going to miss out on what he had to say.
Sure enough, the spelling was intentional and was the key to understanding the change in character of the leading male. I won’t give a spoiler as to how it was resolved, but I went from cringing to admiration.
When I released Going for the Juggler in 2016, oddly enough in another of Laslo Zalezac’s universes, I received a lengthy missive from a reader explaining that the vein in the neck is the jugular, not the juggler, and I should have someone proofread my work more carefully.
I spent an equally long email explaining about how authors sometimes use a play on words. Yes, the title brings to mind the phrase ‘going for the jugular’ as a kill-phrase. But the main character in the novel is a circus clown and juggler and the bad guys are going after him!
He sent back a message that simply said, “Face palm.”
I’m so glad I didn’t immediately respond to Lazlo when I read the title of Thunder and Lightening! (Which, by the way, MS Word still insists is misspelled.)
Going for the Juggler and the previous two books in the Hero Lincoln Trilogy are available as a collection or individual eBooks at Bookapy.
It’s great when we can consciously make a play on words, but what about when a word is misused by a person (or character) thinking they have used the correct word? When the word sounds similar but means something different, it is called a malaprop. Isn’t it amazing that we have words for just about everything?
The malaprop was named after a character in Richard Sheridan’s 1775 play, The Rivals: Mrs. Malaprop. This delightful old lady is constantly attempting to sound learned and sophisticated but can’t utter a sentence without a word that doesn’t mean what she thinks it means.
“Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!” says Mrs. Malaprop. The meaning, however, is “If I comprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my vernacular tongue, and a nice arrangement of epithets"
Sheridan was by no means the first to use malaprops—in fact the term goes back as far as the 1600s. Even before that, Shakespeare’s famed character Dogberry from Much Ado About Nothing is known for the speech pattern that is also known by the name Dogberryism.
“Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons,” says Constable Dogberry, meaning “Our watch, sir have indeed apprehended two suspicious persons.”
Emily Litella, a character created on Saturday Night Live by Gilda Radner was known for her malapropisms. My favorite, especially at this time of year, was when she began her editorial speech with “What is all this I hear about presidential erections?” When she is corrected and told the term is ‘elections,’ she responds with her classic line, “Never mind.”
Sadly, the phenomenon is not limited to fictional characters or done for effect.
Australian prime minister Tony Abbott once claimed that no one “is the suppository of all wisdom” (i.e., repository).
Texas governor Rick Perry has been known to commonly utter malapropisms. For example, he described states as “lavatories of innovation and democracy” instead of “laboratories.”
If you’ve heard anything about a “peach tree dish,” “gazpacho police,” or something “fragrantly violated,” thank US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Sometimes the terms are a simple misplaced word or tangled tongue. Other times, however, they are the result of people attempting to sound smarter than they are. Those are the ones to watch out for.
In writing, we encounter a lot of words called homophones that drive readers crazy. This term has absolutely nothing to do with sexual preference. Homophones are words that sound the same (or nearly the same) but mean something different.
Let’s start with “here” vs. “hear.” The first is indicative of place. The second is the effect of sound on the ears.
To, two, and too are three words with vastly different meanings but that all sound the same. When seen in writing, however, they can be cringe-worthy. To is a direction. Two is a number. Too means also.
Then we have the classic “there,” “their,” “they’re.” The first is a place, the second is a plural possessive, and the third is a contraction for ‘they are.’ Readers cringe when they see these confused.
In the ‘sounds close’ category, one of the most common substitution I see is then/than. Most of the time I see it, then is substituted for than. “Then” indicates an order of events. “Than” indicates a comparison or preference. There is a vast difference between “I’d rather do dishes than have sex,” vs. “I’d rather do dishes then have sex. Only one of them actually ends in sex.
My editor would not forgive me if I did not address ‘verbing.’ A few weeks ago, I mentioned an author whose breakthrough novel allowed her to quit teaching and start noveling full time. My editor let it pass, but cringed and called it out to me. ‘Noveling’ is a term popularized by National Novel Writing Month meaning the act of writing a novel. It’s not a word. Mea culpa.
I sat in a sales meeting some years ago at which a vice president spent an hour talking about how the company was going to ‘incentivize’ the sales force. This is not a word but was manufactured from the noun ‘incentive.’
Usually, when a person makes a verb out of a noun, there is another perfectly good verb that could be used instead. My own pet peeve over the past few years has been the use of ‘gift’ as a verb. What is the difference between ‘gifted’ and ‘gave?’
That isn’t to say we should never make up new words. Every year, we find new words that have entered our language and finally made it to the dictionary. Merriam-Webster announced that it added 690 new words to the dictionary in September 2023 alone. These included:
rizz noun, slang : romantic appeal or charm
rotoscope verb : to draw or paint over something frame by frame in order to create a matte
rewild verb : to return to a more natural or wild state.
logline noun : a simple synopsis of a screenplay, film, novel, etc. used for pitching
smashburger noun : a hamburger patty that is pressed thin onto a heated pan at the start of cooking
girlboss noun : an ambitious and successful woman
Dictionaries can be fun reading!
Next week, something so new and different that I haven’t thought of what it is yet!
This is number eighty-three in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“PUT A COMMA wherever you’d pause when speaking” has to be the worst instruction I ever received from an English teacher. And, in fact, if you look through books and magazines published in the late-1800s and early 1900s, you’ll find pages peppered with the little curved punctuation marks. Some publications look like someone spilled the bottle of them and didn’t clean up.
“But that’s where I pause when talking.”
So what? If you consciously listen to people speaking, you’ll find they pause at all kinds of places that make no sense at all. Pauses are simply a speech pattern and don’t necessarily add meaning to most sentences. Further, people speaking often have no sentence structure at all, and might run-on for an entire page without breathing. Commas are hardly a help there.
There are, actually, places where a comma adds meaning and lessens confusion. In the title of this blog post, adding a comma between ‘eat’ and ‘Gramma’ will save her life.
A panda walks into a café and orders a sandwich. When it arrives, he eats it and turns to the door. He pulls a gun, fires two shots into the air, and walks out. The waiter, puzzled by the behavior, picks up a poorly punctuated pamphlet left on the table which says: “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
This is a quote taken from a bar joke told by author Ursula LeGuin. Author Lynn Truss wrote a popular grammar book titled after the joke, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
The proper meaning, of course, is that “eats” is a verb. “Shoots and leaves” are object nouns—what the panda eats. But with the added comma, the sentence becomes three verbs. To eat. To shoot. To leave.
Another popular saying is “Let’s eat, kids” vs. “Let’s eat kids.” One will leave you fed, the other will leave you dead. Commas save lives.
These examples show that the addition of a comma can change the meaning drastically, but so also can the omission of a comma.
Of course, the best place to use a comma is when separating a list of things, whether nouns or verbs or sometimes adjectives. When we consider this, we often run into what is known as the serial or Oxford comma. I am a proponent of the Oxford comma when it is needed to clarify a list. I believe the only style guide that encourages not using it is the AP Style Guide, which is written to save space in the narrow columns of a typical newspaper.
“Tom likes Sue, Mary, and Leslie.” These are three proper nouns that might not be confused without the comma, but the meaning is clearer with it.
“I’d like to thank my parents, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.” Here, the series is confusing. Is the speaker the son of Robert and Emily? Or is he thanking his parents and two famous poets? A comma before the “and” would make the sentence clear.
“John mounted his horse, drew his gun, and rode off in all directions.” In this instance, we have three verb phrases separated by commas. Omitting the comma before “and” would give the impression there is something more in common between drawing and riding than there is between them and mounting.
It's not gray hair that reveals my age. It's my use of complete sentences and punctuation when I text.
That brings me to the subject of a list of adjectives. Many people place commas between every pair of adjectives in a list. But commas are only needed when the adjectives are of a similar category. What do I mean? I’ll try to explain.
When using multiple adjectives in an English sentence, the correct order to follow is:
1. Determiner (e.g., a, an, the, your, each)
2. Quantity (e.g., one, three, many, few)
3. Opinion (e.g., ugly, cute, precious)
4. Size (e.g., big, small, tiny)
5. Age (e.g., young, old)
6. Shape (e.g., round, square, rectangular)
7. Color (e.g., red, pink, orange)
8. Origin (e.g., American, South African, Korean)
9. Material (e.g., silk, plastic, wooden)
10. Purpose or qualifier (e.g., wedding dress, travel journal)
If multiple adjectives are used in this order, no comma is needed.
“He was a handsome young South American man.”
On the other hand, if using adjectives that fall into a single category above, it is common to use commas to separate them.
“He was an ugly, despicable, dishonest old man.”
All three adjectives, “ugly, despicable, dishonest” could be classed as “opinion.” Note there is no comma between “dishonest” and “old” because they are in different categories.
Changing the order of adjectives from the order they appear in the list will almost invariably sound wrong, even though it is sometimes done.
“It was a linen, orange, antique napkin.” Compare with “It was an antique orange linen napkin.” Even with commas in the first sentence it still sounds awkward.
Is this an exhaustive list of when to use commas? Heavens, no! There are the use of commas to set off an introductory or appositive phrase, the use of a comma to separate a direct quotation from its attribute, separating a participle phrase from the remainder of the sentence, after the salutation or closing of an informal letter, and wherever the sense of the statement is clarified by using a comma.
I will comment on some additional grammar issues in the next post. It will likely be a mishmash of several writing errors I see frequently. You guessed it: “Synonym roles like grammar used to make.”
Enjoy!
This is number eighty-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WHERE Y’ALL FROM?” asked the Southern Belle.
“Where I’m from we don’t end sentences with a preposition,” replied the snooty Yankee.
“So, where y’all from, bitch?”
Yes, we English speakers were all taught that we shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. That wasn’t even a rule until the 17th century when a self-styled grammarian made the statement. But, even then, we don’t always get it right.
In the example above, the first sentence is a fine example of having things understood in colloquial English. While the rule, when interpreted strictly, would require a sentence that said “From where are y’all?” it is awkward and absolutely no one would actually speak that way.
And that is what we’re all about in this post: Rules that get tossed around by the grammar police, but aren’t as absolute as they’d like to believe.
When I wrote Devon Layne’s Redtail back in 2013, I started the story with a deliberate misunderstanding of a question. Cole is asked about his “first time” by a counselor. In our prurient minds, we might jump to the conclusion that the counselor is asking about his first time having sex. And, indeed, Cole launches into a salacious description about what could have been considered a first time having oral sex.
“Why is it that everybody wants to know about your first time? What kind of voyeurs are we? Do we just want to compare to see that we weren’t the only ones who were somehow disappointed? Or to prove that our experiences were so far better than everyone else? Or to participate vicariously in something we lost long ago? The first time. The first time.”
It turned out that his description was of the first time eating oysters. It is revealed, however, that both interpretations are false. What’s really being discussed is his first time as a time traveler.
And so it is with many rules of the English language. They have to be taken in context, not merely as a hard and fast rule.
The three-book Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures series is available as a collection or as individual eBooks at Bookapy, and in paperback from other online resellers.
In the 1940s, a popular joke was credited to several sources, including a clerk, an army officer, and others, but was most frequently ascribed to Winston Churchill, simply because he was the most famous personage. The actual source is unknown.
It is said that Churchill circulated a document for comment and approval and was severely criticized for ending sentences with a preposition. His response was “This is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.”
Yes, the phrasing certainly makes the point of not ending the sentence “This is the kind of pedantry I will not put up with” with a preposition. However, the latter is not only far clearer, but is actually correct! What we miss is that the entire phrase ‘put up with’ is referred to as a ‘phrasal verb’ and is treated exactly as a verb. To “put up with” means to “tolerate.” It is not treated as a preposition at all!
Can you give us some other examples, Devon? Well, certainly.
“That is a woman you would never run out on.”
“She is someone I’d really like to get together with.”
“She has the kind of personality you can really feed off of.”
Those are all phrasal verbs. In most instances, a phrasal verb could be replaced with a different single word verb. “Run out on,” for example, means “abandon.” Of course, they don’t always appear at the end of a sentences. We use them all the time, but never stop to figure out what they are called.
“I’d never run out on her.”
Who is this woman? Well, I do write erotica, so you can choose almost any of my characters to cozy up to.
English has all kinds of ‘rules’ that just don’t always apply. For example, we are taught the spelling rule “i before e except after c.”
Except when your foreign neighbor Keith gets eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters!
And if you try to alter the rule by explaining that it only applies to words in which the ‘ie’ rhymes with ‘bee,’ let me remind you of caffeine, plebeian, protein, seize, and Keith. I’m afraid you will find more words in the English language that break the rule than follow it!
This is so much fun! Here’s another hard and fast rule in English: Use the indefinite article ‘a’ before a consonant and ‘an’ before a vowel. Of course, the first example that comes up, people think of as just being a rare exception: “It’s an honor to meet you.” Okay. So, except before ‘h’. But it goes much deeper than that.
This is one of the cases (remind me to address apostrophes sometime) when the spoken word trumps the written rule. Whether the letter used to spell the word is a consonant or vowel is not as important as the sound it makes.
It is an honor to meet you.
He is a humble man.
She is an MIT graduate.
She went to a university.
In each of these instances, it is the sound of the initial letter that determines which article to use, not the letter itself.
Some people look at the exceptions to our English language rules as being something that destroys the purity of the language. Early spellcheckers, like some editors, determined incorrect words based solely on the rules and blindly corrected to the rule. This is an inherent danger with the new generative AI algorithms. We have no guardian checking AI to see if it is using the correct grammatical form or only the most popular. That’s why so much AI generated text sounds like a speech given by a presidential candidate. It has no filter to determine what is actually correct English.
James Nicoll, a Canadian freelance game and speculative fiction reviewer, turned a phrase in a 1990 article on Usenet that has been adopted and adapted to memes for twenty years or more.
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
Indeed, many of the rules of English simply don’t apply to the homogeneity of our mostly-borrowed language. If you’d like genuine pure English, perhaps you should go back a millennium or so ago and try this on:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Even the British no longer write like Chaucer did in 1400, let alone like the anonymous author of Beowulf just 400 years earlier!
Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum
þéodcyninga þrym gefrúnon
hú ðá æþelingas ellen fremedon.
English has never been easy!
I’ll continue with good writing gone bad in next week’s posting on punctuation. Don’t try this in a text message. You’ll be marked as an old man! “Let’s Eat Grandma.”
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