I got a review this week - well, I
term it a review, it was more of a complaint.
They wanted to draw to my
attention that I had used a word in a story that they didn’t understand. The first
thing I did was search my fanfic inbox. I have never received a message or a review
from this person before. And maybe they changed their username or something,
but probably not. This whole review is a complaint about this word. They have
not started with ‘I was really enjoying your story, when…’ and they have read
nearly forty chapters of it.
I look up their profile. I reply. I
am polite. They are American, I am not. That word means something different to
you than it does to me because we speak different versions of English. I say
that my betas are American and usually catch things, but they are used to my
language now and sometimes words slip through.
They reply. They insist that the
dictionary definition is a different meaning. Yes, it is, because your
dictionary is different to mine. (duh)
I ask: do you really want me to
change that word? It is very early in the morning my time and I have not had enough
coffee yet.
No. They were just letting me
know. They insist that they (as one reader) were thrown out of the story by
that word and that I should add a definition of each word that they might not
understand because they felt it was Australian slang. They object to having to
go look it up.
It isn’t slang… it’s English. At this point I get annoyed.
Oh, the horror. They might have to look something up.
This story has over a million hits
and more than three thousand reviews. No one else has ever had an issue with
this word. It has even been translated into French and she understood what I meant.
The word is a homonym and it is blindingly obvious that her definition doesn’t fit
in the sentence.
I can’t add a definition for every
possible word that someone might have an issue with. I can’t recognise them to
start, because I don’t have an issue with them. And this month I had readers
from 109 countries. I can’t begin to guess what people might not comprehend.
I’d define Aussie slang, but I don’t
use it. [Oh, I did once, in my weredingo fic. I spelled Australia as Austraylya.
That’s how we say it. And I got a review from an Australian telling me that I
had spelt it wrong … snorks.]
So what do I do when I hit a word I
don’t know? I look it up.
I love looking up words. I read at
my son’s piano lessons and I often ask to borrow her dictionary to look something
up. I know that she has a wonderfully fat and enormous dictionary. It is
literally a weighty tome.
This week it was rubefascient*.
Last time it was tenebrous**.
I love both those words and I will
try to use them in my writing because they are beautiful words. I am thrilled
to have new words to use.
I have a very vague recollection
of the children in ‘the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ playing a game they
called dictionary when they had nothing to do and before they decided to play
hide and seek and found the wardrobe. They would flip to a random page in the dictionary
and they had to guess if the word origin was Latin or Greek. What fun! Very vague
but I am sure they played this game before they went exploring. Or was it in
the Dawn Treader? Before they jumped into the painting? Shrugs. Whatever. The point
was that children used to play games based on language.
How tragic is the loss to our
languages, both American English and Australian English, if we only ever used
the same words; the words that people know and don’t have to look up? Language
is a constantly evolving thing. So don’t be scared or annoyed that you have to
look things up. Embrace it!
~~~~
*Rubefascient: means red cheeked. The
sentence was “There was clearly something in the water of Ireland to make its
people rubefascient.” From Peter Temple’s Jack Irish.
**Tenebrous: means dark, shadowy or
obscure. I can’t remember the line but it was in Peter Straub’s Shadowland.
~~~~~
PS: The word the reviewer objected to
was ‘grizzle’ Ironic eh? Given that was what they were doing - grizzling. lmao
English definition of “grizzle”
verb [I] /ˈɡrɪz.əl/ disapproving
› (especially of a young child) to
cry continuously but not very loudly, or to complain all the time:
The baby was cutting a tooth and
grizzled all day long.
They're always grizzling (=
complaining) about how nobody invites them anywhere.
(Definition of grizzle verb from the
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University
Press)
