SILENT BOOMER SPEAKS ON LANGUAGE: SPOKEN AND WRITTEN

Richard Dawkins talking

My query letter, nice little worm, must be getting more attractive. Two nibbles. An agent wanted 5 pages but quickly got back to me. Did not "draw her in", her nice note read. The other, a small Portland publishing house, wanted 4 consecutive chapters. Sent that off this morning after dealing with fear because it also requested my ideas for the dreaded "marketing".

Now for some discussion of language as written and as heard. If we listened to ourselves speak while we're speaking, we'd realize how we actually "sound". Novelists who use dialogue realize there's a line between how our language sounds and how it's written. Enjoyed this article which contained a discussion of Californian language. 

The section about "hella" in the article points up my thoughts. "Hella" is a contraction of "hell-of-a" so it's not really a new word; it's a contraction. I worked with troubled teens in the past and, for a long time, I couldn't understand what a couple of Cincinnati teens meant when they said, "fingo". Later, I realized "fingo" was a contraction for an Appalachian phraseology, i.e. "fixing-to-go" as in "I'm fixing to go shoot that man if he don't quit singing." 

Deafness contributes to changes in language too. In the 60s, people used to speak of "boogieing" as in I'm going to "boogie it out of here", meaning get out quick from the frenetic dance, boogie-woogie. Wasn't many decades after that phrase appeared before I began to encounter the written word "book" in place of "boogie". Now people were "booking it" out of somewhere. Phrase made no sense except to the ear. Recently, a friend, Carl Tropea, pointed out that "book  it" might be a phrase coined from "booking a flight". That makes sense.