Gods and slang
Another day when by the time I am facing The Horror That Is The Blog again* I have no brain with which to harry and feint. I haven’t even done anything today.** Except SHADOWS of course.***
PamAdams
No, no! That’s not it at all! I’ve been meaning to respond to this . . . since last autumn when someone at Forbidden Planet asked me something similar, and I’m glad of a forum comment to prod me. But this is a good example of how dangerously different the writer’s eye view may be from the reader’s. I had two purposes in having people swear by odin and thor and kali and carthage and by gods instead of God and so on in SUNSHINE—first because I did want to spread the net a little wider: this is a world where there are more active religions jostling for place in an alternate America than there are in the world we live in. But I didn’t leave Christianity out deliberately—I didn’t mean to leave it out at all. But I didn’t realise the extent to which I’d, um, obscured its presence. Because the subsidiary reason for the other gods is that ‘thor’ and ‘kali’ aren’t swear words—in this world. It should have been ‘thor’ and ‘kali’ and ‘christ’ but ‘christ’, in this world, is rude. And, believe it or not—says the woman who used the c-word in SUNSHINE and no one is ever going to let her forget it†—I prefer only to cause fury and outrage either when I mean to or when I haven’t got a choice. Thor and odin and kali look like swear words and perform the function of swear words without causing the swear-word reaction in this-world readers.
This is also on my mind because while the slang differs in detail, the exact same thing is happening in SHADOWS. They swear by gods and hells just as Sunshine does. (But not by thor or kali.) If I ever did write that sequel to SUNSHINE I’d put jesus and christ back in—yes, no init cap, because none of the other gods are—and brace myself.†† I used the c-word last time. How much worse could it be?†††
* * *
* Another really excellent reason for 36-hour days is that the frequency with which the blog presents itself to me to be written^ would be cut back by 50%.^^
^ With a demeanour rather awfully like a hellhound feeling that a hurtle is overdue.
^^ At least I think that’s what I mean. The fact that I read Prof Stewart’s mathematical prodigies in the bath, and laugh, doesn’t mean I can do any of the stuff.
** Well I did take redelivery of the Laptop Monster. Remember the new laptop I bought . . . something like two months ago? And that Raphael and Gabriel have been hosting hot and cold running engineers for about the last six weeks because Large Nameless Stupid Computer Company is too anal retentive simply to give me a new one and get it over with? I remember ranting about this here not long ago.
So it came home (again) today. It’s still shiny and silver and large and weighs too much. It also, allegedly, no longer discharges its battery by 50% overnight. So, should I join Lovefilm for my 3-month free trial^ and test the freller out? I asked the angels to strip some of the stuff off this old laptop so it’s not straining at the limits of its hard drive any more—can’t say I’ve noticed any improvement in speed however—since I am, on mature^^ reflection, just not going to change ungleblarging operating systems mid-final-draft. Life is harrowing enough. But that still leaves me with a large shiny silver object to do something with.
^ I’ve got some kind of extreme voucher here somewhere.
^^ Gabriel was wearing a kidney belt and—bending himself over the back of a chair because sitting down was Not Good for his sciatica—said well, you know, when forty is rushing up on you. Tell me about it, I said, I turn sixty in November. Both of them successfully managed to look surprised, but then Raphael blew it by saying ‘I wouldn’t put you a day over forty-one.’. Snork. Have I mentioned that our service contract is due for renewal?
*** I also ordered a ‘like new’ copy of Japanese Cooking, A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji as recommended by Jacky on the forum. I went and looked it up on amazon and it gets like twelve stars from everyone. Only it’s not available. Well, frell this for a lark. So I hit the ‘abebooks’ button and found a nice clean cheap copy on the east coast of America since there don’t seem to be any on this side of the pond. Feh. This is the second time I’ve done the abebooks button-pressing thing in three days. I am bad.^
The first time was about looking at kanji. I’ve been reading this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Read-Japanese-Today-Practical-Languge/dp/4805309814/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329871721&sr=8-1
which makes those diabolical little squiggly things—and kanji are the seriously squiggly, borrowed from Chinese ones, as opposed to the comparatively straightforward katakana and hiragana syllabaries^^—actually look friendly and comprehensible. No mean frelling feat. And before anyone climbs all over me again about Going Too Far, kanji are one of the stronger memory-flicks from my five years as a child in Japan. Kanji tell stories. The problem with Read Japanese Today is there’s no INDEX and also no stroke order—one of the fifty-year-old books I’ve hung onto about the Japanese language is an extremely intimidating list of the 2000 or so basic kanji you need to know if you’re going to read Japanese, and while it scares the living daylights out of me, I find that to decipher the squiggles I seem to need to know how you build the suckers, line by line. And the First Two Thousand has changed in the last fifty years. So I’m reading my Japanese Today and trying to find the squiggles in my old book and going wait, that’s not the same.
Also, I want fewer than 2000 to grapple with, even in my slithery dilettante way. So I looked up kanji again on amazon, and the book that includes how to write the first few hundred kanji that got twelve stars was not available. (Which is probably why I didn’t order it in the first place.) So I hit abebooks and . . .
^ I also have trouble remembering that books cost money. I mean, I do know they cost money, I just feel that book money shouldn’t count when you’re figuring out how not to run out of money before you finish something that someone will pay you for.
^^ Clearly one of the additional purposes of kanji is to make you think you can learn katakana and hiragana at least.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_katakana.htm
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_hiragana.htm
† And the reason why, as I’ve said as many times as it has come up, is because there are no casual slang words for female genitalia. There is no ‘dick’ equivalent. Dick isn’t a word you use with your gran, I know, but it doesn’t make averagely crass people come out in hives the way the c-word does. In Sunshine’s world, that word is the dick equivalent.
†† Which is to say there will probably be ‘jesus’ and ‘christ’ in ALBION. I won’t know till I get there.
††† Don’t answer that.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.