Aline Soules

Poet and Fiction Writer

Aline Soules

English as an uncommon language, Part I

It has been said that the Americans and British are separated by a common language.  One could argue that all English-speaking countries and peoples are separated by that not so common language.  One area of differences centers around accent, dialect, and country idioms, and those differences are both large and small.  (I’ll talk about other differences in my next post.)

I was born in Scotland and still have in my possession something called The New Testament in Scots.  This book is written in a dialect called “braid” Scots or “broad” Scots.  When I’ve had occasion to read to non-Scots a line or two in the accent of my youth, some assume it’s Gaelic; none understands it.  To quote the line from the front cover:

“Gin I speak wi the tungs o men an angels, but hae nae luve i my hairt, I am no nane better nor dunnerin press or a rínging cymbal.”  (Hint:  I Corinthians, 13:1).

And that’s one of the more intelligible lines that I suspect you can figure out.  Try this one:

“Efterhend I will gae back an bigg up again

    the dwallin o Dauvit, at hes faan; 

what is nou but a ruckle I will bigg up again

   an raise up the haill aince mair…

That’s from The Book of Acks (Acts), 15:16.  “After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up…”  (I used the King James version of this verse because that’s the origin of the broad Scots bible).

Clearly not clear.  I spent time correcting autocorrect to make sure that I reproduced it correctly and it’s still autocorrecting even after I think it’s set, so forgive me if it’s not completely accurate.  I can’t take my eyes off autocorrect for one second (pet peeve for another post down the line).

Dialect is one of many differences.  You can look at Ebonics, for example, and experience the same thing.  According to the dictionary, Ebonics is American black English regarded as a language in its own right rather than as a dialect of standard English.  Fair enough.  You could probably say the same thing about braid Scots.  But we know that these languages have emerged from some form of English, even if they are combined with other elements and have evolved into their own unique entities.

These are more extreme variations, but if you listen to two people talking the same or similar English, those two people may not understand each other because of their different accents or because they “swallow the words,” meaning that people in some dialects speak quickly and don’t verbalize the ends of their words, as if they “swallow” those sounds.

A classic story from my own family was told to me by my father.  My father wasn’t born in the UK, but in Poland.  His mother was English; his father a mix of French, Austrian, and Polish.  During WWII, he ended up in the UK, but had a Polish “flash” on the upper arm of his army jacket at that time.  On one occasion, arriving at a train station in London, he overheard a man from Somerset asking a London bobby (policeman) for directions.  Their accents were so different that the bobby couldn’t understand the Somersetian, and the Somersetian couldn’t understand the bobby.  My father ended up translating between these two Englishmen.  

While British accents have “regularized” to some degree since the advent of television, there are still marked differences and native Brits are well able to identify where a person comes from. The same is true to some extent in the US.  You might not be able to pinpoint an accent as accurately as is the case in the UK, but you know a Southerner from a New Yorker from a Californian. 

So much for a common language.  

Image credit:  https://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-apples-oranges-image3867687

Retirement Day 1

Or perhaps I should say “evening 1.”  After working full-time for decades, I left work at the end of the afternoon for the last time.  I have felt strange for days and I anticipate feeling equally strange tomorrow morning when I wake to others preparing to go to work and I have the entire day ahead of me with nowhere I have to go.

Retirement is an odd concept.  For centuries, people worked until they were unable to do so, at which point their families (nuclear or extended) took care of them until they died, which was generally not too long after they were unable to continue working.

The Atlantic offers an interesting online article called “How Retirement Was Invented.”  Apparently, in 1881, “Otto von Bismarck, the conservative minister president of Prussia, presented a radical idea to the Reichstag: government-run financial support for older members of society,” i.e., retirement.  By 1889, the German government created a retirement system, which provided for citizens over the age of 70—if they lived that long.  The U.S. began offering pensions about the same time and the concept of retirement with a pension has evolved from then.  Today, people fear that the system will break and that pensions will not be available to our next generations.  But I am one of the “lucky” ones—an early baby-boomer with a pension. 

I put the word “lucky” in quotes because there are a number of factors that make retirement lucky or not.  A primary consideration is health:  how long I’ll live and what state I’ll be in as I age.  If I’m lucky, I’ll have some years of health and energy.  Another consideration is the length of my life and what I choose to do with the time I have left.  The length of my life is largely out of my control (eat right, exercise is mine, but genetics?).  What I choose to do is the part I control.

The key to my time now is that it’s “unstructured.”  That means I can easily fritter it away.  How easy it will be to put off to tomorrow what I don’t feel “motivated” to do today.  I don’t know if that will happen to me, but, prior to today, my last day, I prepared a schedule for myself to try to forestall that.  I may not stick to it every day and it will require tweaking as I identify more things I want to do, but I did it to forestall frittering.  I don’t want to get five years into retirement, look back, and see that I’ve not made a difference in some way, accomplished something.

For retirement is not a matter of retiring to my bed or my house and putzing around.  Retirement is an opportunity to focus on activities and goals I want to achieve—spend time with my grandson (when I can), travel, write, quilt, sing, play the piano, improve my French—and a hundred other things.  I won’t achieve them all, but I will achieve some of them and enrich this period of my life.  For I am not really retiring.  I’m transitioning to a new period of accomplishment.  It’s just that, in most cases, I won’t be paid and I will be the driving force that makes them happen.

Image:  https://hackernoon.com/start-now-to-retire-young-retire-rich-8a179660adfb

Pet Grammatical Peeves

We all have them—pet grammatical peeves.  We see them or hear them and it’s exactly like fingernails on a blackboard, an itch you can’t scratch, being on the verge of a sneeze that won’t come but won’t go away.
Consider these:

  • “15 items or less” (although I should give my thanks to Trader Joe’s; their sign reads “15 items or fewer”)
  • “do you want to lay down?” (Lay down what?  Why don’t people understand that the present tense of “lay” is a wholly different verb from the past tense of “lie”?)
  • “utilize” (what’s wrong with “use”?  I refuse to sign any report or letter with “utilize” in it—the pretension is just about as annoying as the uselessness of “utilize”)
  • “between you and I” (between is a preposition and the pronouns after it should be in objective case, i.e., “between you and me”)
  • “myself” (nothing wrong with this word, except when people use it because they don’t know whether to use “I” or “me”—see above)

I could keep going, but you get the idea.  I bet you have plenty of examples, too.  I try to remind myself regularly that English is a living language and, therefore, subject to evolution, but somehow I can’t get past my pet grammatical peeves.  While it might sound like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon, I try to respect our language and counteract these problems by doing my best to speak and write grammatically—even when I text.  Join me—please.  

Sumer is Icumen in — along with Summer Conference Season

Summer is such a great time for renewal, re-creation, and expanding horizons.  As a writer, I can tell it’s time for summer because emails and snail mails about summer conferences flow in, enticing me with their subjects and tantalizing me with the wonderful presenters/workshop leaders.  Of course, there are expenses—registration, lodging, flights, meals, incidentals—and there are times when I get greedy, take on too many, and find myself exhausted by the end of the summer.
But I love them.  I write this on the first day of the AWP conference, which I am not attending for a variety of reasons, and some of you may read this while you are in Tampa, but I’m talking about the lazy summer conference—the kind that inspires you to write with space and time to write during the event, the kind that sends you home with a sense of euphoria.
You don’t get that with every conference you attend, but, if you’re lucky, you do—and it’s the best gift ever.  You come home and, if you’re even luckier, that “high” stays with you for at least a week.
So here’s to summer conferences.  Check the web, lists in Writers Digest, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Chronicle, wherever you can get a good list.  Find the ones you think you want and check them out thoroughly before you spend your hard-earned money.  Then go.

San Francisco Writers Conference

I just attended the SF Writers Conference for 2018 and it was fabulous.  There were multiple tracks for fiction writers, non-fiction writers, memoir writers, poets, self-publishers, marketers—something for everyone.  For poets, one highlight was the keynote speech by Dana Goia, current poet laureate of California.  He spoke eloquently about creation and read a few poems.  He really knew how to inspire us.  I’d not been to this conference before and my main goal was to get my feet grounded in this conference to understand how speed-dating worked, how pitching worked, and practice.  When my novel is ready next year, I’ll feel much more confident; meanwhile, I received a couple of “nibbles” to send pages or a query when I’m ready.  Most encouraging.  As a result, I spent less time on poetry tracks, although I did have a 15-20 minute conference with Diane Frank, both poet and novelist.  She was most encouraging and she, too, offered me support on my novel based on its premise.
Writers conferences are a great blessing—from the small to the large, from the unknown to the famous.  They provide a writers’ community; learning opportunities from experts; connections to editors, publishers, coaches, and others; a sense of the latest trends; and, if you’re lucky, an opportunity to meet someone with the same sensibility, someone who can work with you in future through a writing group (online or in person).
Writers conferences are listed in a number of places, e.g., Poets & Writers (sign up for the e-newsletter if you can’t afford a subscription), Writers Digest (again, same set-up), Association of Writers & Writing Programs (same set-up), and lists through a standard Google search.  Get on the e-mail lists and you’ll get brochures in the mail, as well.  Costs vary, but events local to you will probably be your cheapest option.  The key is to connect and stay connected.  It will enrich your writing life.
Image credit:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing