The Lexicographer's Rules

I finished adding all my books on my scrap list to my Amazon wish list. These are the books that I couldn’t find on Amazon (US):

Le pornithorynque est un salopare by Alain Créhange. (Mille et Une Nuits, 2004). Found on Amazon.fr.

A Persian Dictionary of Argot, Mehdi Samai (Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz Publishing, 2003).

Ard Al-Sawad (Land of Darkness), a novel in three volumes, by Abdel-Rahman Mounif. Recommended by Languagehat.  I could not find it on Amazon because it has yet to be translated into English.

For the Last Time, Learn English, by David Kendall (Nexus, 2004)

Diccionario de Modismos, de Ramón Caballero. (Librería El Ateneo, Buenos Aires, 1942).

Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas. Panhispanic Dictionary of Doubts. (Real Academia, Santillana, España).

Ami Konglish Uloitanv, by J.B. Sequeira. Covers Konkani and English.

Compendio ilustrado de lengua y cultura yanomami, (Illustrated Compendium of the Yanomami Language and Culture), by Marie-Claude Matt.

Dictionary of Criminal Slang published by the intelligence division of the Israeli police.

Diksyoner Kreol Angle (Ledikasyon Pu Travay, Mauritius).

Township Talk: The People, the Language, the Culture, by Lebo Motshegoa. (South Africa).

Dictionary of Media and Journalism, edited by Chandrakant P. Singh (2004).

La aventura del español in America, Humerto López Morales. (Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 1998).

Comprehensive Slang Dictionary (Milon ha-slang ha-makif), edited by Rubik Rosenthal. (Keter, Israel, 2005).

World Dictionary of Hebrew Slang, Dahn Ben-Amotz. (E. Lewin-Epstein, Jerusalem, 1972).

Tesoro léxico de las hablas riojanas, José María Pastor Blanco (Universidad de La Rioja. Servicio de Publicaciones, 2004).

In Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing he includes at number ten, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.…Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.”

I skip dialogue. I skip it by the book-full. The bookstores (even the non-chain ones) have shelves and carrels stuffed with what some good-hearted writers (and a bunch of evil ones) are convinced is their best work ever. To me, those books look and read like screenplays packaged with pretty covers. They’re all dialogue. They’re insubstantial. I never buy them if I can help it.

In books, I often skip full passages of dialogue because I’ve learned that most writers write dialogue poorly. It’s mainly a space-filler for them. Manuscript-padding.  ("It took me forever to write it! There are 900 pages!") Most of it is less interesting than what I could hear right now at the corner of Madison Avenue and 34th Street.

So I would rewrite Leonard’s rule to say, “Make sure there’s a reason for everything. Dialogue needs to reveal, description needs a destination. Either becomes hooptedoodle if written over-long, out of rhythm, or with too many writerly good intentions.”

I’d also add in there somewhere: “Most boring descriptions can be aided by being broken into short sentences and short paragraphs.”

And Amen! on the just say no to adverbs. The only one I usually forgive is “warily.” It seems to perfectly capture the side-to-side head and eye movements of a man in expensive shoes who is fishing in a pay phone’s coin return slot.

Boing Boing is one of the most-linked and most-read web sites on the Internet and Cory Doctorow is a self-promoting hype machine (but at least his work is usually worth the hype, unlike, oh, millions of other self-promoting hype machines), but his post on how Google Print works, its legality, and why publishing should abandon its complaints and lawsuits, is spot on. He nails the subject with nine-pennies right to the bookstore door.

Side note: Does publishing have a New York street designation like “Wall Street” for the finance industry or “Madison Avenue” for advertising? You could try “Fifth Avenue,” I guess, but to me the image of Fifth Avenue is more about tony shops and tourists walking around after hours during summer wondering why everything’s closed. Fourth Avenue used to be a good choice, when below 14th Street it was Book Row, but the book shops are gone now.

(Thanks to Erin for the heads-up on the Boing Boing piece.)

I enjoy browsing book stores and sales in hopes of the random score for something readable—I’m not looking for valuable first editions. I’ve never been one to festishize books for their dollar value, just their informational, emotional, or intellectual value. The most money comes into it is when I calculate cost per idea. Something like the Norton Anthology of American Literature scores very well, especially when I can get it on the dollar shelves at the Strand, where I’ve found both the first and second volumes for exactly that price.

So you can imagine how depressing it is to me to read about people bringing bar code scanners to book sales to buy only those books with a high resale value. Dealers have to make a living, I guess, but they’re not buying books, they’re buying product. Widgets.