Bronte Follower: Blog

A lot of important stuff happens in this chapter, so I've been a while writing it. As I often do, I allow ideas that come to me during writing free rein to see where they go. On 116, I wound up making two very long excursions that I ultimately decided not to use. One or both might eventually wind up in Beth Outtakes. Be prepared, as this chapter is a shade over 19K words, and should be published sometime tonight (or tomorrow morning if you're on the other side of the world).

I ran into a bit of a problem with this chapter. Had Beth actually been writing it, it's a problem she would not have had. I was cruising along, getting nearly to the end when my brain finally put a couple things together and slapped the big red "Emergency" button. Even though I KNEW Celeste was leaving for Indiana on Friday morning, the year's last day of school for the Go6, I still managed to include her in the whole chapter. So, I had to go back through and re-write much of it, hence the slight delay relative to my most-recent plan in getting the chapter queued.

Happy various holidays to all! Of course, that's holidays in Beth time, so....

As I'd written earlier, a lot of lines of the story are developing, hence the longer chapters of late. This situation will continue for well into the New Year for Beth and the... various gangs. Fortunately, two things have come together for me, the first being a relatively light workload at work, the second being a surprising number of highly efficient evenings of writing.

In English, particularly American English, the construction of vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) somewhere after the first letter of a word generally makes the first vowel long. Contrast that to vowel-consonant-consonant, in which the vowel is short, regardless of whether the second consonant is followed by a vowel, although, beware of digraphs (see below).

You remember short versus long vowels from elementary-school English classes. Right?

The 'i' in 'dime' is long, the 'i' in 'dim' is short. Any vowel sound that does not say the letter's name is not long. While it might not be short, it is NOT long (although the long 'u' is usually 'ooh,' not 'you' or 'yew').

Yes, this is English I'm discussing, and many of its 'rules' have gobs of exceptions, but it's a good rule to know, as it helps solve a lot of spelling conundra. In fact, I'm betting most English speakers have little or no idea why there are so many short English words that end with 'e.' In fact, the entire reason that words like 'bite' and 'dame' have an ending 'e' is specifically so that the previous vowel is 'forced' to be long, otherwise, they're too readily confused with 'bit' and 'dam.' It's, of course, not all that surprising that the 'i' in 'hypocrite' is NOT long. [eye roll]

In 'general,' a word with two VCV constructions, none of the vowels are long. However, in general, the VCV pronunciation paradigm is a useful indicator of how words are spelled.

One of the (many) problems with VCV involves the 'gh' construction in words that acts as another forcing agent to make the vowel before it long, a feature true of all these:

bight, fight, light, might, night, right, sight, tight,
wight.
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This is below: Digraphs are two consonants that, together, form a distinct sound different from either component consonant, such as the ending 'ph' in 'digraph.' In fact, I've always been disappointed that the word 'diphthong' describes two vowels combining to form a sound different from either component of the diphthong, despite that 'diphthong' has THREE digraphs in it! Poor planning!

I've recently been finding the adjective "incredulous" used in places where it was obvious that "incredible" was what was meant. While we currently think of "incredible" as a synonym of "wonderful" or "spectacular," the original meaning was "not credible," that is, "not believable," "in-" being a negating prefix, such as found in inoperable, ineffective, and inordinate.

"Incredulous" is an adjective that describes a person or a person's manner and means that the person is unable to believe something said or done.

Ex.: Tracy was incredulous that Frank whipped it out right there in the grocery store.

Physical things cannot be incredulous. Appearances cannot be incredulous. Actions cannot be incredulous.