Made up words

Made up words.  Every family has them—or so I believe.  They are words commonly used among family members that are believed to be legitimate English words but are not found in any dictionary.  Some of them may be bona fide English words but may be used in a different context to common uses.  Others may be common items but called by a specific brand name rather than the common name.  Sometimes these pesky words sneak into our writing unwittingly.

My family is fraught with them.  My father was a carpenter who always referred to formica by its brand name, Arborite.  One day he sent me to the store to purchase some Arborite.  As soon as I asked the shopkeeper for Arborite, he said, “You’re Lloyd’s daughter aren’t you?  He’s the only person on the island that calls formica Arborite.”  That was the first time I realized my family had its own unique diction.

The second time took me a little longer.  We grew up referring to movie trailers as “draphic.”  I had no idea that it was not a legitimate word until I went to graduate school.  I was talking to a lab tech about the draphic to a movie and she had no idea what I meant.  When I explained the meaning to her she said there is no such word.  I challenged her. We looked it up using many resources at our disposal, and I lost.  There is no such word as draphic.  Of course I had to be conceited, so I defended my position by saying it is a Kittitian word.  I’ve since then spoken to a lot of Kittitians about the word.  The only people who know what it means besides my family are friends of my family who frequented our home.

  I started looking up a lot of the words that we commonly used in my family vernacular and yes, many of them were not real English words, but still, they sometimes creep into my writing unwittingly.

Take for example the word spall.  According to Merriam dictionary, as a noun it means a small fragment or chip and as a verb it means to break off or chip.  In my family, and maybe on a broader level, my island, it had a very specific definition that was restricted to eroded enamel utensils.  If an enamel cup or plate had an eroded spot where the paint was chipped and we could see the rusting metal beneath, we said it was spalled or spalded or spall up.  And if you dropped a perfectly good enamel utensil you could “spall it up’.  In writing my latest romance, “Hurricane of the Heart” to be released this summer, I described an enamel plate as being spalled.  My publisher/editor asked what it meant.  I found it perplexing that she was from the Caribbean, from the same country as me and had never heard of a spalled or spalded or spallup cup.  So we looked it up.  Eventually I realized though the word spall is used to mean chip, there is not “spalled” or “spalded”.  We eventually changed the word to tarnished.

I’m sure it’s not only my family that mangles English words with so much reiteration that the members accept them and their usage as standard English.  What are some of the unique words in your family or cultural vernacular that you thought were Standard English?  Do they ever creep into your writing and if so does it enhance or adversely affect your writing?

 I want to wish Novel Spaces a happy 6th anniversary today. 

Write on, novelnaughts, write on!

Writing in an unwritten language

My author bio mentions I love writing short stories and poems in the Kittitian language.  Well the problem is there is no written Kittitian language.  It is simply a dialect of English with a few words derived from other languages of our ancestors and many who influenced the history of the island.  For most of my life I spoke and was totally surrounded by that “language” or variations thereof.   Thus when I wrote in the Kittitian dialect, I just had to write the way I talked.  I never quite considered syntax or format or that there were even rules to that language.  I just wrote how it sounded phonetically. 

Fast forward to today.  I have migrated to another country.  I am married to another Caribbean resident who speaks a French based dialect rather than an English based dialect.  I am not hearing or using the Kittitian language as often as when I was at home, and even my accent has been neutralized for clarity.  Worst yet, it’s been a while since I’ve written one of my short stories or poems in my native tongue. 

Since my daughter learned to talk she has been harassing me to teach her to talk Kittitian.  And I kept saying, you can’t teach it because there are no rules to speaking it.  You just have to hear it and pick it up.  A few weeks ago, after a visit to my family my daughter was trying to speak Kittitian.  In a very awkward, abrasive sounding accent that is totally unrecognizable to me, she said, “Me a winnin’ man.”  

Automatically I corrected her, “Me a win, not me a winning.”

“Why?” she asked.

I thought for a moment.  Then it hit me.  There were rules for our unwritten language.  “A” placed between the subject and the verb is actually the present continuous tense.  So “me a win” is literally translated “I am winning” in English.

I realized then that writing in the Kittitian dialect, even though it is an unwritten language, is more than just dropping the ends of words and replacing them with an apostrophe.  It is bound by rules that for me just “sound” right.  That’s the reason you say, “A gon’ go cook” instead of “a gon’ go cooking.”  “A gon’ go cook” is the future tense.

When it hit me I wanted to do a little jig, because now my unwritten language could actually be written in a consistent fashion and I can actually teach it to someone else, if I can figure out the rules.

What’s the take home message?  Even unwritten languages with all their dynamic changes and rhythms have their rules and when you break those rules it does not sound right.  So whether it’s Ebonics, Southern, Cajun or Klingon, or some made up language of your characters, there are rules to writing it. 

I guess that’s my New Year’s Epiphany.  What’s yours?

Becoming a Grammarian

I've always prided myself on having good grammar. I give the credit to a solid British based education based on the three R's, Reading, wRiting and aRithmatic. I recently had this belief shattered to its core when I started a course in Grammar. It is a part of a certificate programme and I expected that it would be a piece of cake. I began the first diagnostic test confidently, even cockily. I scored quite well, but I was quite surprised at the effort that it took.

I have now been reading "Woe is I" by Patricia O'Connor, and this entertaining book on grammar has taken a spot on my bookshelf next to my Strunk and White. I have learned many of the more intricate rules behind some of the patterns that were already familiar to me.

How easily can you choose the correct sentence construction?

He is one of the authors who say / says it best.

I wish I was / were in St. Kitts.

Jane is wearing what looks / look like a mink coat.

See you again on the 28th.