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A Case For Y’all

I labored to write the management book What Do I Do When I Get There? in a gender neutral fashion. (I mean, how awkward after all is “he/she,” and/or “he or she?”) In the process of putting the book together, I became sensitized to useful gender neutral words, which is why I’ve become so very fond of “y’all.”

Think about it. Is “y’all” singular or plural? Male or female? It just depends, and rather than risk offending anyone by careless gender reference, I simply say “y’all.” It just rolls off the tongue. Try it. It’ll grow on y’all, guaranteed.

Rod

Is It a Typo?

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Millions of words and a few thousand books later, my attention is arrested by one word in Josephine Fey’s charming novel, A Shilling for Candles: “refutal.” What an interesting word.

My Google internet search is met with the question, “Did you mean ‘rebuttal?” So I’m not the only one to wonder if “refutal” is an English word or a typo. But, further down the screen, I also find, “Refutal” the act of refuting,” and I have to believe the word is simply a quaint but charming usage by one of our English sisters.

By the way, do you think it’s re-futal with a “you” sound, or a re-futal with a “cut” sound?

And now on to the next million words.
Rod

Gavatch, Kafregaldorf and Crambons

Nuggets of Language

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Like most people, I read novels and watch movies (films?) for the stories, and for the action. But every once in a while a real nugget of a phrase drops into my lap, and sticks with me…phrases like “along come a stranger and stopped to argue some,” or “lean and sere as a winter wolf.”

I don’t have to dig around in the data banks of my mind for those. The only hitch is finding a way to share them with other readers and writer who might appreciate them as I do.

All of which is preamble to thinking it might be fun to offer a copy of my novel Stone Fly to the first two or three readers who would like to share personal favorites we can post here.

For now I’ll post my disclaimer that I never steal phrases from other writers. This is just for love of the language.

Rod

The Genesis of my Compulsion to Write Stuff

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I hung on the schoolyard fence through most of the fifth year of my life, watching school kids play on the swings, teeter-totters, merry-go-round, or play catch and kick balls.

I really, really wanted to go to school.

And then the first day of the first grade, I discovered a dark-haired little girl named Marion who already knew stuff I didn’t know…and she was only a girl.

I knew stuff all right, like how to chunk a rock, split kindling, pick blackberries, climb trees, ride horses, and catch fish…boy stuff.

But she knew an amazing thing: she could write words on the blackboard. All I could write was “Rod.”

By the end of the first week, I had mastered a short list of words: the, run, and, ball, hat, cat, fat…those first words we learned in first grade way back when. Best of all, I knew I was gaining on Marion when I found a word she didn’t know yet.

To this day, I blame Marion for my compulsion to learn new stuff and to write about it. If she hadn’t walked to the blackboard and written “the,” I might have been content with knowing boy stuff, but I knew I wasn’t going to let a mere slip of a girl child know more than me. (I know. It should be “more than I,” but six year old boys say “me.”)

I’d like to think I outgrew that competitive drive to know more than my classmates and moved on to a higher altruistic level of artistic compulsion, but when I read a really good novel, I’m back at the keyboard wanting to see if I can write a better story than “that.”

How’s Your Book Coming?

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I’ve noticed groups of people in certain venues silently queue up and only speak in hushed tones when circumstances force human interaction. You know what I’m talking about: grocery lines, doctors’ waiting areas, banks…those places in which people try very hard to avoid eye contact. There are times when banks are quieter than a mortuary.

I also admit I’m one who likes to see if I can squeeze some fun from the tedium of waiting in line. If the queue at the bank is a long one, I’m liable to call out, “Send for more checkers!” and then wait for a reaction…not from the cashiers where I bank…they’ve gotten used to me…but from the queue. (Or should that be queuers? Is queue plural already? Someone should look that up.)

I find mild satisfaction when the line stirs and people make eye contact. Sometimes they smile or frown at the noisy one. Even frowns are better than deadpan faces.

The business of kick starting conversations started for me in the waiting area of a quick-lube. A half dozen people were sitting silently in hard plastic chairs, reading stuff…newspapers, books, grease-smudged car magazines…each trying hard not to touch elbows.

I was working, scribbling notes on a draft manuscript when I caught a man two chairs down trying to sneak a peek. He looked quickly away, trying to pretend he wasn’t being nosy. (I guess he couldn’t help himself because genius was just dripping from the pages.)

The person sitting between us was called to the desk to pay the quick-lube guys, and the empty chair gave me and my nosy neighbor a more comfortable distance.

Just on a whim, I put the manuscript back in its folder (where maybe it should have stayed forever) and asked, “How’s your book coming?” He looked surprised for half a second, and then answered, “Actually, it’s a play.”

Alas, I find only three writers among every five people on whom I spring this question. And the non-writers often respond with, “I don’t write, but Dad (or some other relative…it’s a fill in the blank response) wrote a good book that I’d like to see in print.”

I don’t know whether to be encouraged or discouraged by the discovery that only sixty percent of the citizens of the country are writing books, but if you want to check my statistics, try asking a fellow passenger or fellow queuer, “How’s your book coming?”

Rod