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.

A MAN FROM MISSOURI

Back in the 1960s when I was drinking heavily and falling into ruin, I worked in this building in downtown Dayton, Ohio. I drank in the Magic Carpet Bar located on the first floor of the building. Occasionally, I drank in the alley behind this building with the stevedores who unloaded produce trucks in the district when much of the first floor was inhabited by small Italian-owned produce businesses. My experiences in and around that building will, from time to time, show up in what I write! The building is now called the St. Clair Lofts. It's been converted out of all recognition of my past life.

I've just roughed out a character sketch of the man from the The Greatest Generation who owned the company I worked for in that building. I plan to write several stories about the men from his generation I met while working in this building. Following are three paragraphs from that character sketch:

Born and raised in rural Missouri, Bruce was mechanically brilliant, a tinkerer and inventor as good as Edison but never able to come up with his own “light bulb”. Like so many engineers, Bruce Roberts couldn’t spell cat. I asked my father one time how Bruce managed to get a college degree as ignorant of the English language as Bruce seemed to be. Roughly paraphrased (as is most of the dialogue reported in my reminiscences), my father responded, “He’s brighter than you might think. I don’t know exactly how he got accepted into college but he did. Someone must have seen his potential. It’s not a full four year degree, I don’t think. Earned himself a two year degree in engineering from a Polytechnic college. In Indiana I believe.”  
   My father told me about Bruce’s anti-gravity machine. Bruce spent years and unknown quantities of dough putting it together. With my father as his sole witness one evening, Bruce stepped onto a round metal platform, threw a switch and waited. After a few moments, he stepped back off the metal platform and with genuine bewilderment, arms akimbo, exclaimed quietly, “It should work!”

Bruce was more than a wild eyed dreamer. He invented a successful throttle for the static testing of jet engines and sold it to General Electric in Cincinnati. His throttle ran more than 100 hours before needing repair. The throttle it replaced needed repair every 5 hours. My educated guess is that Bruce’s throttle kept Central States afloat through the years I knew him and long after I left Central States and Ohio for good.