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Forthwringing Tonguishness

By

adjectives

A client recently asked me why English is so bizarre.  She was trying to explain its quirks to a precocious, bi-lingual eight-year-old, and not doing very well.  Not that I did much better – English is a genuinely freaky language, with random spelling rules, no particular sentence structure, and far more words than any reasonable language needs.  Part of the reason it’s so confused is that it’s perfectly happy to steal useful words from just about anywhere it can get them, from Hindi (“shampoo”) to Tshiluba, one of the languages of the Congo (“chimpanzee”).

But the root of English strangeness comes from the way it was formed when two sources of language flowed together.  Old English originally grew out of Anglo-Saxon, which is more-or-less Germanic.  Then Old English was conquered literally and figuratively by Norman French, which was still fairly close to Latin at the time.  As a result (outcome), English at its heart (essentially) has at least two words (expressions) for every concept (thought), one from each of its two mother streams (foundations) of language.

But while this hot mess of a history makes English hard to use, it does give writers a chance to control how their work feels just by picking which source they draw their language from.  Short, consonant-packed words grounded in Anglo-Saxon have strength and punch, while longer, vowel-infused Latinate derivatives feel more cerebral and anemic.  There’s a reason all of the most effective obscenities come from Old English.  Calling someone a coprophagous, copulating, progeny of a female canine just lacks . . . spunk.

Consider the list of typical adjectives above (thanks to Ben Blatt of Slate).  Note that five of J. K. Rowling’s adjectives have their roots directly in Anglo-Saxon, and some of the others (“famous,” “magical”), while Latin at heart, are still brief and punchy.  Seven out of Stephanie Meyers’ ten, on the other hand, are polysyllabic, vowel-enriched Latin.  This helps explain why the Harry Potter world has an earthier, friendlier feel compared to the Twilight Saga.  (Ms. Collins’ Hunger Games books fall in between on both counts.)

Or consider the following passage:

 

The elements consist of particles called atoms.  These are extremely small; one gram of hydrogen contains on the order of 2 X 1022 of them.  Most atoms combine to form what are called molecules.  Thus the hydrogen molecule contains two hydrogen atoms, the oxygen molecule contains two oxygen atoms, etc.  (Some elements, such as helium, remain uncombined; others, such as iron, form crystals in their natural state, and there are further possible combinations.)

Ordinary, somewhat dull, high school atomic theory, right?  Now try this version:

 

The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts.  These are mightily small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.)

 

Suddenly the passage sounds like something from the eldritch scrolls of ancient wisdom.

The second version is drawn from “Uncleftish Beholding,” an essay in which Poul Anderson translates common scientific terms from their Greek or Latin roots into their Anglo-Saxon equivalents – creating what Douglas Hofstadter dubbed “Ander-Saxon.”  The information is literally identical.  The feel of the passage is completely transformed.

But there’s more at stake than the feel of your language.  Paying attention to the source of your vocabulary gives you control over the pace of your sentences.  Even if you are using the same number of words, shorter, Anglo-Saxon ones make your writing feel like it’s moving more quickly.  “This isn’t exactly what I envisioned would occur,” takes longer to get through than, “This isn’t quite what I thought would happen.”

Note that the second example also feels looser and more authentic – more like something someone would say in conversation.  As we say in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, all dialogue is a formal construct.  The trick is to hide the formality – to make it seem natural and flowing.  Choosing words rooted in Anglo-Saxon helps you do that.

Which stream you draw your language from is a powerful tool for character creation, as well.  More educated characters tend toward Latinate terms in general.  It was, after all, the language of science, medicine, philosophy, and law for centuries, and still infects the jargon of these professions and the people exposed to it.  If you push the use of Latin roots to the point of self-consciousness, your characters come across as pretentious even if readers aren’t consciously aware of how they’re using language.  On the other hand, simpler, less ostentatious words often convey the sense of simpler, and often more likable, characters.

So if you want to loosen up your dialogue, control how your readers see your characters, or just make your fictional world feel a little less bloodless, pay attention to where your language comes from.  Lean toward words that have found their home in English for a millennium or more, and your language will become more expressive.

Or, in Ander-Saxon, your toungishness will wax forthwringing.

About Dave King

Dave King is the co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a best-seller among writing books. An independent editor since 1987, he is also a former contributing editor at Writer's Digest. Many of his magazine pieces on the art of writing have been anthologized in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing and in The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic. You can check out several of his articles and get other writing tips on his website.

Comments

  1. Interesting wordstuff, Dave. I never realized that the origin of my word choices had an impact on my prose and dialogue. It’s especially critical for my middle-grade characters. Sometimes I catch myself slipping into the multi-syllable words that a 12 year-old would never utter unless he were a prince in training.

    Thanks for your insight. Always a valuable lesson.

  2. Dave–
    Wow. I know from fortunate, personal experience that you’re a great editor. But until now, I didn’t realize on what deep bedrock your gifts are based. Or is that too elaborate, ornate, over-wrought, foppish?
    Anyway, thanks for making plain what lies behind that most elusive of terms among writers–voice. The trick is for the writer to internalize the effects of sound, so as to hear where he goes right or not. I still contend that reading out loud what’s been written can reveal problem areas. It used to work for my students, and it still works for me. It would make sense to do this with passages from the three successful novels you mention, to hear enacted what you’re saying about Latinate vs Anglo Saxon-based English.
    Thanks again for a terrific post. This one’s a real keeper.

    • I’d read “Uncleftish Beholding” before I was an editor — it was originally published in Analog magazine in the mid-80’s. Once the internet became a going concern (Sooth, we live in mighty years, indeed.), I relocated it and have been itching to use it since then.

      Glad you liked the piece, Barry.

  3. Love it! Explained so vividly and well. Kate Atkinson, in “Life After Life” throws into the mix lots of weird, often lengthy Latinite words alongside very short, yet uncommon, Anglo Saxon ones with ironic intent, and humorous result.

      • On closer analysis, it might be just the “cuckoo effect” of English vocab that struck me as I read this book by Kate Atkinson. But here’s an example of the interesting mix: “Sylvie traipsed off to find a discreet spot in order to feed Teddy. Girls brought up in nice houses in Mayfair did not generally duck behind hedges to suckle infants. Like Hibernian peasants, no doubt. She thought fondly of the beach hut in Cornwall. By the time she found a suitable covert in the lee of a hedge, Teddy was bawling his head off, little pugilistic fists clenched against the injustice of the world… Spotting her, he stopped, staring at her like a startled deer. For a second he didn’t move but then he doffed his cap and said. ‘Still hot, ma’am.’”(Kate Atkinson, “Life After Life”, p 70)

  4. Thanks, Dave!

    You know, I never understood the concept behind my writing until this article. I’ll write, carefully selecting word choices and phrases, thinking, “Okay…getting a little too polysyllabic for this character. Let’s keep it simple–short and sweet,” but not realizing why I was doing it. The English language fascinates me. Thanks again.

    • You know, one of the greatest compliments I ever got was when a client said, “I didn’t really know what my novel was about until I read your report.” This ranks with that one.

      Thank you.

  5. Really enjoyed this, Dave, and immediately wished I had studied more languages in school. I’m only just picking up enough Latin because of church. We had the OED in my lab (I’ll bet the only biochem lab that had its own copy) and I liked looking up origin of words and their history. Since English tends to incorporate other languages easily, I wonder whether one can track how quickly a culture is say getting Indianized or Islamicized. Thoughts?

    • I suspect that English is already pretty full, with so many words for such various concepts that we’re not borrowing new words unless they’re unique and very useful.

      Having said that, I kind of hope we’ll lift “fhaddle,” meaning to hang around and talk about nothing in particular, from Arabic. It seems like an eminently useful word.

  6. Great piece Dave. Brought to mind an introduction I once read to T.S. Elliot’s poems explaining how the poet returned to the Anglo Saxon roots of our language; how modern poetry in general discovered a new appreciation for the shorter bolder punch of fewer syllables. And loved learning about “Uncleftish Beholding”! What a great example of how to fashion text to suit archaic or fantasy settings. Thanks!

    • Interesting, Jeatnne. I hadn’t heard about how modern poetry had returned to its Anglo-Saxon roots. I wonder if it’s part of the look backward in music at the time — of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ return to English folk music, or Hindemith’s return to baroque fugual forms?

      I love the way I always manage to learn something from the discussions.

  7. Fascinating, Dave! And this is the best blog post title ever. I’m going to steal it and take full credit for your brilliance.

    Thank you for appealing to our love of words this morning. We are all work geeks, I am sure!

  8. Dave, you male offspring of the she-dog, thanks for this good piece.

    Having sung my own aria here at WU — https://writerunboxed.com/2014/12/19/when-there-are-no-words-whose-fault-is-that/ — in which I asked our readers to get beyond pop-speak, as I call it, I couldn’t be happier to see this smart post from you. You’re doing what I didn’t do — enabling better stuff. (Me, I like to just fuss at people, you know.)

    Two questions:

    (1) When Mr. Blatt’s graphics at Slate refer to adjectives and adverbs among the authors as “distinctive,” he refers to their usage as distinct from each other’s choices, right? Surely not “distinctive” as in notable or laudatory. Those words are hardly distinctive and, if anything, contribute, I fear, to the populist appeal of those writers. Nice, easy TV vocabulary, for the most part, however distinct from each other’s pacing and rhythmic factors they may be.

    (2) Do you have resources that collect English words into source-groups? Is there, in other words, a compendium (try that on Ms. Collins) that lines up everything coming into English from the Latinate vs. Anglo-Saxon lines? This would make it a lot easier to heed your good counsel to “know our chickens” (that’s the Italianate, ever-pretentious) in choosing what we’re doing, rather than taking stabs in the literary darkness. In fact, I could use (don’t ask) a reference that lays out what has come in from Greek rather than Latin origins. Are you aware of anything out there that starts with the source? If one is seriously working in one groove or another, that’s a lot more efficient way of going at it than dreaming up a word first, then having to check and see if you (or the thesaurus) can come up with a right-source alternative.

    And may we all write more “distinctively” than Collins, Meyer, and Rowling. :)

    Cheers,
    -p.

    On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson

    • Dear Porter,

      Though Mr. Blatt’s article isn’t entirely clear, I suspect he’s using “distinctive” as a relative term. The adjective has to be used by more than one author, to eliminate genuinely unique adjectives. But one author has to choose it more often than the alternatives used by the others. In other words, given a choice, Ms. Collins went for “despicable” while Ms. Rowling went with “nasty.”

      I’m not familiar with a resource that lists the etymological roots of words. When I was working on the article, I had to dig into a lot of them individually — to tie “famous” to “fama,” for instance. It would be a useful source, though. I haven’t done a thorough internet search. Maybe one of you could exercise your Google-fu?

      • As a college freshman in the late 60s, I took a reading class where we spent most of our time studying root words, and most of those were Latin and Greek roots. While I no longer remember the name of it, we had a text book, so I know there once was a book of Latin and Greek root words.

        An avid reader since age 7, this class had not been my original choice, but due to a schedule change it was the only palatable option left. Needless to say, I thought it was going to be a waste of my time, but it turned out to be one of the most interesting and useful classes I’ve ever taken.

        • Porter and Dave, you might enjoy A Complete Etymology of the English Language, which has this bold charter:

          “Containing the Anglo-Saxon, French, Dutch, German, Welsh, Danish, Gothic, Swedish, Gaelic, Italian, Latin, and Greek roots, and the English words derived therefrom, accurately spelled, accented, and defined.”

          Downloadable here: https://archive.org/details/completeetymolog00smitrich

          Since it was published in 1895, you probably won’t be able to find the wherefroms of “hashtag” or “selfie” or “catfish,” but you won’t miss them.

          Fun post Dave!

          • That’s amazing. No compendium made of all those latinate roots and other foreign sources of the English language ever done by anbody since 1895? Surely, there’s an urgent need to update that! Yes, we don’t need to worry about selfie and hashtag, they clearly fall into larger families (in terms of their roots), such as self, hash and tag.

            An while I’m here, I wanted to thank Dave for this stupendous, witty post. Great fun, a stimulating read!

          • Well found, Tom.

            Remember, though, that this is as much about the feel of a language as the actual roots. “Beef” does trace back to the same Latin root from which we get “bovine,” but it’s still a short, punchy word. And even Rowling’s Latin-rooted words — magical from “magi,” famous from “fama” — are brief and direct.

            You can often simply let your ear be your guide, once you’ve learned to listen.

      • Boy, do I feel silly. Just browsing Amazon to find a book for my grandson’s upcoming birthday, I decided to see if I could find that book of Latin and Greek roots I used as a college student. To my delight I found there are dozens of such books (I even found one for my nine-year-old grandson). I don’t know what made me think root words, especially Latin and Greek roots, were no longer part of vocabulary studies.

        However none of the Amazon books looked familiar (well, I took that class in 1969, so I don’t really remember what it looked like, I was just hoping I’d recognize it if I saw it). I hope I find it again (no idea what happened to my copy) as one of the things I enjoyed about that class (and book?) were the little histories that accompanied many (all?) of the root words. I did find some interesting looking etymologies, including the one Tom Bentley referenced, and one I think my grandson will enjoy.

        Anyway, thanks for the entertaining article, the two-day diversion from a stuck story, and for reminding me of how much fun we can have with words, even when they aren’t being used to tell stories.

    • Hi Porter,

      As an easily accessible resource, I’ve found dictionary.com, which often has a map beneath the word to list if it’s of French or English or Latin origin.

      Is it a reliable resource? I’m relying on someone with a more academic language background than me to answer that question. Lisa

  9. I’ve been studying Irish Gaelic and I’m amazed at how similar many of the words are as well , if not by spelling , then by sound to modern English. From what little I know about its history, I liken the language to an ice berg scraping along a continent scooping up bits here and there until it settled in the British Isles. Very interesting, Dave. Thank you.

    • I’m not surprised at the Gaelic influence. Anglo-Saxon and Norman French are the main streams, but the Irish were running the centers of education (Lindisfarne, Iona) while the various Germanic tribes were putting together England. I understand there’s a fair amount of Danish influence as well, from when the vikings rolled over England before the Normans got there.

  10. I loved this article. Thanks so much, Dave. I’m such a word-geek.

    (In fact, I’m such a word-geek, that as I started reading the translated science, I thought: ‘Isn’t this from that essay… uncleftish something?’ Frisson of excitement when it turned out I was right.)

    • As I say, “Uncleftish Beholding” stuck with me for years before I pulled it out for this article. It really opens your eyes to the difference those punchy little words can make.

  11. This was such a fun post to wake up to this morning, Dave. Linguistics was one of my favorite classes in graduate school and I especially loved the lecture on the origins and evolution of the English language. You just gave a mini (and more entertaining) version of it here. Thank you!

    • I know. I’m fascinated with the way people thought in the past, and use of language is a sign of (and possibly a reason for) the differences. There was a lot more I could have said about English’s strange and spotty history. I didn’t even get into “the king’s English,” for instance.

  12. This is a great piece of information, Dave, and one I’ll definitely keep in mind going forward.

    I’m currently writing a bio-historical fiction set in Denmark’s mid-1800s featuring main characters grounded in the nobility and royalty of the time. It’s difficult to find that balance between stiff formality of speech that would have been used, but might take a modern day reader out of the story, to remaining authentic to the time and language of the day. I recently posed a question on the Historical Novel Society’s forum asking about the use of language when writing historical fiction, and this received a slew of responses that were really interesting and thought-provoking.

    What are your thoughts (or anyone else’s here) on writing historical fiction dialogue and the struggle to hold the reader while also keeping the tone of the period?

    • Good question, Debbie.

      The best suggestion I’ve ever come across for recreating the language of the past is to steep yourself as much as possible in the everyday language of the time. Read over personal letters, newspaper reports, court transcripts, diaries, graffiti, any source that would capture the way people spoke in their day-to-day lives — as opposed to more formal sources like speeches or essays.

      Some time ago, I wrote an article on the topic that you might find helpful.

  13. Dave-

    Pshaw! The etymological roots of the words we choose make for prose either more inelegant or lapidary? I don’t purchase it.

    Damon Runyon didn’t cogitate too laboriously about his elocution, neither. This literary guy mixed up all kinds of verbiage cocktails in his shaker, leaving us all the wiser and none the smarter, but at least letting us feel like we is in on something sweeter than an inside tip at Aqueduct, which is to say prosody uniquely Americano and all the more lapidary for it.

    Choose your words with attention to whether they sprung from the mouths of sword-winging whack-ado cats in helmets with horns, or toga wearing oratorios whose dictionary is a sleep aid? Nah. I says sling yer lingo like it was a cat by the tail, howling and screeching so as to keep the neighbors up and enliven the party we’re having in the alley.

    I mean, yeah, like them beat cats and Mr. Tom Wolfe, whose kandy-kolored, tangerine-flake streamline baby writing is da bomb. Or Hunter. Man, that psychonaut knew how to sling a cat or two on the page, ya know what I’m sayin’?

    Hoo-baby, rock’n’roll!

  14. Thank you, Dave King! I have a manuscript with characters born in the 1880s. I had used words like “dreamt” and “leapt” because those sounded like the words these New England characters would use. (I used to love those words in poetry.) But, an English teacher reader of mine told me I should change them because dreamt, leapt, etc. were the old Germanically influenced words no longer in use. For me, to make the change killed just a little of the “flavor” of these characters, but I did as she recommended. Now, I’m going back and make them who they are and use them in the text, too, because I’m trying to capture that time and culture.

    • Hey, Lynn,

      As I suggested earlier, I think the best way to get into the head of language of nineteenth-century New England is to go to the source. I know those old New Englanders were great journal keepers and letter writers. Check local historical societies.

      In fact, my wife transcribed the journal of an 18-year-old farmer who lived here in Ashfield. You can find it at http://www.ashfieldhistorical.org/ The website is a little primitive, so I can’t link to it directly. But click on “collections,” then “documents,” and you’ll find it. I’d call your attention to November 25, after the Free Soil Party (precursor to the Repbulican party) won the local election. “Free Soil party rules.”

  15. Wow. In Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, we spend maybe half a paragraph on relying on Anglo-Saxon as a way of loosening up dialogue. I’ve long thought there was more we could say about the matter. Apparently so, given the responses so far.

  16. Dave, what a pleasure to read your post. Something in the blood of those of us descended from Celts and the Norse god-lovers leaps up in joy to hear the old rhythm and language come to life.

    A literal English translation of Gothic Gospel of Matthew, which I rummaged around on my shelves to find, and am glad to have open in my lap again this morning:

    And Jesus answering quoth to them, tell-do John that ye hear did yea see did:

    The blind upsee, yea halt gang, the thrushes-full rinsed are wroughten, and the deaf hear, and the dead arisen, and the unladen well-preachen-to are.

    Yea easy is he, whoso he is, that murmurs not at me.

    But they then off-gone, Jesus began to quothen to the many about John. What did-ye-out-hie in the woods to see? a rush wagged from the wind?

    But what did-ye-out-hie to see? a man invested in nesh vestments? see they nicely vested be, in courts of dictating ones.

    …Amen I quoth you, not hath arose in the borne of queens one more than John the dipping-doing, but the meanest in the circle of the dominion of heaven is more than him.

    But from the days of John the dipper unto yet, the circle of the kingdom of heaven is un-mighty-ed, and the unmightying-ones overwhelmen do it.

    • This is fascinating and fun, Edi. I’ve read a translation of the Saxon Gospel — The Heiland — in which Jesus gives his disciples the secret runes of the Lord’s Prayer and the devil appears to Pilate’s wife using a helm of invisibility. But I’ve never encountered this before.

  19. Thanks for a thought-provoking piece. I’ve seen William Zinsser espouse similar opinions about the strength of Anglo Saxon words in his wonderful book On Writing Well.

    But I’ll admit, I’m having a hard time buying the premise that words from one linguistic source are consistently more or less powerful than those from another source, any more than I can accept that certain classes of words (such as the much-maligned adverb) are somehow weaker than other word types. To me the beauty of English is in how rich a mixture it is, so I’m not inclined to limit which of its flavors I dip into.

    That said, the pro-Anglo Saxon stance definitely helps decode the power of a writer like Hemingway, whose work I deeply admire.

    Hmmmm – you’ve given me much to think about. Or do I mean cogitate?

    • I think the word you’re looking for is “mull.”

      And of course this isn’t an absolute rule. Latinate words have their place, as do adverbs — five of J. K. Rowling’s ten are Latin-based, after all. It’s more a question of being aware of the proportion so you can control the feel you’re looking for in your language.

  20. Forsooth, what awesome thinking. Fascinating. Educative. brainshaking. Or in a word much used by the Millennials: EPIC.

    The flip side, offered here for consideration is how you—the creator—perceive your readers/interlocutors, as this example demonstrates:

    On some air bases the Air Force is on one side of the field and civilian aircraft use the other side of the field, with the control tower in the middle. One day the tower received a call from an aircraft asking, “What time is it?”

    The tower responded, “Who is calling?”

    The aircraft replied, “What difference does it make?”

    The tower replied, “It makes a lot of difference. If it is a commercial flight, it is 3 o’clock. If it is an Army aircraft, it is 1500 hours. If it is a Navy aircraft, it is 6 bells. If it is an Air Force aircraft, the big hand is on the 12 and the little hand is on the 3. If it is a Marine Corps aircraft, it’s Thursday afternoon and 120 minutes to “Happy Hour.”

  22. In case anyone hasn’t read it, Bill Bryson’s book, “The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way” is a hoot. It’s informative and one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.

  23. Inspiring, intriguing post, Dave. Thank you.

    When I write dialogue, I like to look up the words the characters use (2 time periods; 2014 US and 1930s East Prussia) and wonder…would this character use the word of French origin? Or English origin? Or….?

    Language is fascinating.

  24. Enjoyable post, Dave! Ate up every word (alternate word for the word, ‘word’ goes in this parenthetical) as food (fuel) for thought.

    _The Language of Fiction_ by Brian Shawver includes a section on Anglo-Saxon and Latinate diction.

    I would expect the Harry Potter series to contain a large amount of Latinate words and Latin vocabulary since, I think, the stories are set in a wizard academic world with robed students and learned professors casting spells (or enchantments) in Latin. I’m sure there are perfectly good gutteral Germanic wizarding words, but they are best kept in that hut off campus where that big guy lives.

    • I’m glad you were able to digest my verbage.

      I was a bit surprised by the Anglo-saxonishness of the Harry Potter books, given that all the spells are in mock Latin. But maybe her use of Latin for the spells is meant to contrast with the everyday language — to make the Magic feel special.

  25. I adored this post, Dave. My first novel involved a professor of languages, and there was a period of time when I was a wee bit obsessed with the subject of words — where they came from, when they originated, how they sound in the mouth. I now see I might have become truly obsessed, so thank you very much for not posting this back in 2008.

    Lastly, if science had been taught using words like firststuffs and unclefts I am quite sure I would have loved it better.

    • Forsooth, Therese.

      I could have actually gone on a lot longer — on the relationship between language and class, for instance. After all, Norman French was spoken by the aristocracy — it was three hundred years before England had a king who could speak English — and Anglo Saxon by the mob. So anyone who needed to deal with the upper classes, or who had pretensions of joining them, needed to speak Norman.

      Farm animals kept their Anglo-Saxon names until they were cooked, after which Norman French kicked in. It was a cow until it became beef or veal, a sheep until it was mutton. I think that tells you that cooked meat didn’t wind up on Anglo-Saxon tables very often.

      Even as late as the eighteenth century, London was full of schools of elocution, to teach the up-and-coming how to speak like the quality. That’s why the Spectator was able to parody them by advertising an elocution school for parrots.

      And maybe someday I’ll do an article on how English seems to have a separate word for even the most obscure concepts. Where German, for instance, creates new words by slapping together old ones (gloves are “handschue” or hand-shoes; a nurse is a “krankenschwester” or illness-nun) English has individual words for everything. The slit made by a saw cutting wood is a “kerf.” The wooden handle of a scythe is a “snathe.” I don’t think other languages do this.

  26. My freshman comp professor and George Orwell salute you! Please write the article on how English has separate words for concepts that in German would be compounded from old ones. (And don’t forget the swine that became pork. :-))

  27. A glorious 10 minutes fhaddling….thank you, Dave! Should you and Porter ever get it together on that Complete Etymology of English Verbiage, let me know. Meanwhile, I’m saving this post for another gander.

  28. Wonderful article and fascinating information. Thank you. Language fascinates me, the origin of words. This is just tip of the iceberg, I know.

    There is so much to think about when it comes to writing dialogue, so much that I’ve never really thought of before. Just shows ho much I still have to learn.

    • Thanks, Phoenix.

      I said this earlier, but it probably bears repeating. I think that what you really need to learn is to listen for the sound of the words. Latin vs. Anglo-Saxon origins explains some of the feel, but ultimately it’s the polysyllabic, vowel-heavy nature of the Latin words that trips dialogue up. It doesn’t hurt to be aware of origins, and if you’re a word geek (from the Dutch “gek,” meaning mad or silly) it can be a lot of fun. But ultimately, you want to train your ear.

 

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