The Lexicographer's Rules

One of my favorite blogs, Langue sauce piquante, is run by the French copy editors for the Parisian newspaper Le Monde. I like it because it keeps my French skillz a little fresher and because I love, love, love blogs that deal with one small subject very well.

On Sunday they listed a bunch of business Anglicisms that have recently made themselves comfortable in French—at least in business- and journo-français—and asked readers to speculate on their proper translations into French. Lots of their suggestions are jokey and funny.

The correct answers were posted today.

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I got the galley pages for my book today. It looks real! (Source Link)

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.

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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.)

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Martha Barnette, alongside whom I had a ball guest co-hosting at KPBS in San Diego for a couple of episodes of the show A Way With Words, has started blogging about language. (Source Link)