Paksworld

No sooner was I into a new POV in Book Three than the whole words thing came down on me.

A character “intoned” something.   Now we all now that “said” and “asked” are the safest ways to denote speech: they’re just about invisible and don’t stick out in unwanted ways.   But every once in a while the way of saying or asking matters, and in a situation where a physical gesture won’t do.  In this case, a gnome is quoting The Law.   It’s like a preacher quoting the Ten Commandments…he’s almost chanting it.   Intoning it, in fact.

But does it stick out too much?  Hmmm.  For some readers, it will pass and add resonance to the passage.  For others, it will be an excuse to wave their mental arms at an imagined teacher and complain that the rules say you should only use “said” and “asked.”   Hmmm.   For now, it’s still in.  For later,  I don’t know.

And a little later, I was caught in another word-related tangle.  “Dangerous” and “perilous,” to be precise.    They’re synonymous in most usages, but they don’t feel the same.    The book title Dangerous Visions suggests one kind of story filter…Perilous Visions would suggest another.  Sometimes etymology can help a decision (“danger” coming from ME daunger: power, domination, arrogance, back to L.  dominus, master, but possibly also influenced by the late Latin damnum, injury and loss….and “peril”  from Latin periculum,  a danger [big help there] via OFr and ME.  But, aha!,  danger as taken from another Latin word, experiri, to try or attempt…thus exposure to harm or risk…jeopardy.)   But sometimes etymology simply takes up hours of time and doesn’t offer a solution to the modern problem–writing for the modern reader’s understanding of the words–including the reader’s feel for the words’ emotional resonance.

Back in my problem paragraph…am I dealing with danger in the sense of risk,  or danger in the sense of meeting someone of power and mastery?   Hmmm.

Owen Barfield, in one of the essays in a book honoring Charles Williams, commented on the essential lie at the root of words…words become substitutes for things, and thus can be made to falsify the reality of those things.   (For instance, corporations are granted legal personhood in some ways,  with the result that corporations very deftly remove legal responsibility from some actual human beings and place it on a legal fiction–the corporation as person.)

Take any noun: sock, let’s say.   We can point to a sock and say “That’s a sock.  Sock means that article of clothing.”  But the word “sock,” once in a human brain, can morph into something other than the sock we pointed to.   Can place limitations (“That’s not a real sock–that’s a costume piece”) and extensions (“Of course it’s a sock–it goes on your foot, doesn’t it?)    What’s the difference between a sock and a stocking?  Do you think kids’ pajamas with “feet” are “sock-feet” or “stocking feet?”  What about hose?

When we utter a noun and believe it’s really the thing it names…we err.  “Sock” is not the object that I have on my left foot at the moment.   It’s a code.

Obviously, a writer can become too interested in all this (here I am writing a blog post and not the story) and yet words are our material–our clay, our stone, our paint and plaster, our bronze and gold and silver.   We have only words to paint those pictures in your minds–to make our characters as solid as human flesh,  and their behavior as real as your neighbor’s.

It is a perilous road we take, for words are dangerous.