Etymology for the Writer or Artist

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others. It’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, although many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with Etymology for the Writer or Artist. Every artist knows the names of the techniques and methods used to produce that painting, sculpture, or moulding, while writers are well-acquainted with parts of speech, tenses and grammar. But how many artists really know how a technique, style, or even a colour got its name? Are writers aware of why a noun, verb, or adjective is known as such? And very few will understand just why tenses are known as they are - I mean who ever though the 'pluperfect' sounded remotely useful as a term? Not simply a lesson in etymology this is a very different way of looking at history and how the English language developed over several centuries.

Created for the many writing groups I have spoke to, it made a change for them from the usual guests who either tell them about themselves or attempt to inspire their writing. A couple of examples from the origins of our alphabet.

A – derived from the Greek alpha. Used in the modern sense to mean ‘the first’ dates from the 17th century. The Greeks got it from the Hebrew and/or Phoenician aleph (greek not permitting the use of consonants at the end of words so they added the ‘a’) and this, in turn, from the Semitic group of languages where eleph literally meant ‘ox’. It is thought the character represents the head of an ox.

O – from the Greek omicron and a meaning of ‘small o’, this from the Proto-Indo-European word smik or ‘small’ as this is a notably small vowel. As a letter it is derived from the Phoenician ayn or ‘eye’, itself taken from the Egyptian hieroglyph of an eye. O is also represented by omega, a comparatively late addition to the Greek alphabet and not seen until around 2,800 years ago. It is related to omicron and means ‘great o’ as in literally ‘o - mega’. If you want to know the diffidence between omicron and omega simply look at the word ‘lotto’, where the short version is near the beginning and the longer at the end.

P – comes from the Greek pi and itself from the Phoenician pe which, in turn, comes from the pictogram of a mouth.

Z – comes from the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet zeta and it is also the basis for our modern letter Z. Derived from the Hebrew zayin, literally meaning ‘weapon’ and likely a reference to its shape resembling a jagged edge.

G – if you’ve ever wondered why we have two pronunciations for the letter G – as in Gary and George – it is purely down to source. The hard G in Gary is Germanic, the softer G in George is from Latin and prior to that Greek. In fact the latter G did exist in the Latin alphabet but was written as a Z (try saying George with a Greek accent but spelling it with a Z, it works).

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.

30 Years of Not Being Published

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others. It’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, although many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with 30 Years of Not Being Published. In over three decades more than ninety published works have appeared on the shelves. This talk is not as negative as it may first seem. During this period I have amassed a vast number of rejection letters, but still managed to average three books a year and more than one article each and every week. Listen to the experiences, the mistakes, the ideas, the tips and advice on how all writers have something to learn and also to contribute to the literary world. There is a PowerPoint presentation to accompany this talk if required.

When it comes to finding a publisher, possibly the best piece of advice I have is simply to find a published book that is as close to yours as possible, then pitch it to that publisher. The reason? Because an editorial department have the job of producing something new, but sales teams want what is selling .

Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting. — Says Jonathan Franzen, who fails to remember ‘very’ is a word which Oscar Wilde advised writers to edit out and replaced with ‘damned’ as the publisher will then cross out every example and thus make the ideal manuscript.

“Write what you know about” – Brilliant advice. Except for the advice on how to check every fact, research every snippet, and all the rest of the baloney. And there’s also the fact that people (yes even writers) are sometimes mistaken and what they “KNOW” is incorrect. If not, nobody would ever get divorced, have unwanted pregnancies, jobs they can’t do, or ever make a mistake. As a little pointer to how stupid this advice is, do some research into all these HOW TO books for writers and look at how many books they’ve had published previously – you’ll be amazed at how often it is their FIRST and perhaps even ONLY book .

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.

Motivational Tricks of the Writing Greats

Often asked how I manage to keep myself motivated and stuck at the desk to write, I was reminded of the episode of There's No Such Thing As A Fish, the podcast by the QI Elves (and much funnier than QI itself), where they discussed the weird ways authors of yesteryear kept themselves at the desk. I recall one Victor Hugo who only ever wrote in the mornings, often spending the afternoons riding around on buses to ensure he wasn't tempted to return to his desk and write. And if that wasn't enough when set a deadline to write The Hunchback of Notre Dame inside five months, he bought a large bottle of ink then put himself under house arrest by having all his clothes removed save for a large grey shawl knitted specially for the purpose of keeping him warm. History records these tactics worked as he finished weeks ahead of schedule.

Another shaved off just one side of his hair.

James Joyce wrote lying on his stomach in bed using a large blue pencil, wearing a white coat. Much of Finnegans Wake was written in said blue on pieces of cardboard. In truth he was nearly blind, having had severe eye problems as a child and rheumatic fever at the age of 25. He underwent more than two dozen operations on his eyes, none of which helped in the slightest.

Virginia Woolf is held to have always written standing up, purchasing a desk with a sloping top and standing 3.1/2 feet high for this very purpose. Not that it was any help to her writing, this was simply so she could write standing up, just as a sister Vanessa Bell painted standing up (hardly the same thing).

Friedrich Schiller could never write unless his olfactory senses were assailed by the smell from a drawer full of rotten apples.

Eudora Welty edited by an early form of cut and paste - cut with scissors and pin the new write in its place.

Vladimir Nabokov, for reasons best known to him, had to keep his feet wet when writing.

John Steinbeck always wrote in pencil, insisting upon twelve perfectly sharpened pencils on his desk before starting work. Working with traditional hexagonal pencils created calluses on his hands, hence his editor kept him supplied with round pencils to alleviate the problem and maintain his productivity.

Truman Capote never started or finished anything on a Friday, never stayed in a hotel room where the telephone number involved '13', and by tucking any surplus into his pocket ensured no more than three cigarette ends in the ashtray.

Edgar Allen Poe balanced a cat on his shoulder while writing.

Further details can be found in the very funny Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors by Celia Blue Johnson.

Pen Names

Over the years many authors have opted to use a nom de plume. Historically female writers have chosen to write under a male name - perhaps the most famous being the Bronte sisters, Anne became Acton Bell, Charlotte assumed the name Currer Bell, and Emily was Ellis Bell - and for good reason in a world dominated by men.

Whilst it is easy to see why some opt for pseudonyms, I was intrigued by why particular names were chosen.

Charles Dickens wrote his Sketches by Boz, he chose Boz as it was already well-known in the family. His youngest brother, Augustus Dickens, picked up the nickname 'Moses' from one of the brothers in the highly popular nineteenth century novel The Vicar of Wakefield. It became the norm to pronounce it nasally, hence 'Boses' which was eventually shortened to 'Boz'.

Daniel DeFoe was born Daniel Foe, he considered the addition made him sound more aristocratic. Later claimed to be descended from the family of De Beau Faux, thus saying he was simply replacing the lost 'De'.

Washington Irving wrote under a series of pseudonyms. In 1809 he completed his first major book and, in a clever publicity stunt, set about creating interest in his satirical examination of self-important local history and politics A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, written under the pen name of Diedrich Knickerbocker. He then placed a series of missing persons notices in all the New York newspapers. First he asked for the leads on the whereabouts of the 'crusty Dutch historian' and later, under the guise of the hotel proprietor, demanded that Knickerbocker return to settle his hotel bill or he would find the manuscript he had left behind quickly published in payment. Readers followed the story as closely as they would any serialised drama, especially when city officials were reportedly offering reward money! The fictional name of Diedrich Knickerbocker is still in use when referring to inhabitants of Manhattan.

Mary Ann Evnas never recorded why she chose George Eliot and yet her long-term relationship with critic George Henry Lewes must surely have been the only real factor. Lewes was a married man when they met in 1851, within three years they were living together and remained so for 20 years, with Eliot calling herself Mrs Lewes. Unlike the Brontes she never needed a masculine image, female authors were quite accepted in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Yet when she wrote her last piece for the Westminster Review entitled Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, she showed her desire not to be thought another female writing of trivial and ridiculous plots.

Eric Arthur Blair wrote what is now known as Down and Out in Paris and London and insisted it was published under an assumed name in order to protect his family from the embarrassment of his time as a tramp. He suggested four possible nom de plumes: P. S. Burton (the identity he had assumed on the streets), Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H Lewis Allways, leaving the choice up to the publisher. He later adopted George Orwell, inspired by the River Orwell, as it was "A good round English name".

John Wyndham, the nom de plume of a science fiction writer best remembered for The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos also wrote under other pen names - John Benyon and Lucas Parkes. It is easy to see where all three assumed names came from, he was named John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris by his parents.

That Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson will come as a surprise to few (if any). He chose the name as Lewis was the English form of Ludovicus, itself Latin for Lutwidge, while Carroll is an Irish surname not dissimilar to the Latin Carolus, which is the anncestor of the English Charles.

Why Samuel Longhorne Clemens adopted Mark Twain for his writings has been told many times, not least by Clemens himself who also credited his riverboat captain Isaiah Sellers as signing his reports on the ever-changing river conditions 'Mark Twain'. For those unaware, Clemens worked on Mississippi riverboats for some years, the river known for its moving banks of silt making navigation tricky and hence the depth was checked regularly on a sounding line. The line had a mark at two fathoms and as long as that mark reached the water level the river would allow safe passage. When found to be safe the cry went up of "Mark Twain", 'twain' being the archaic term for two and thus was two fathoms (12 feet) deep.

William Sydney Porter wrote under the name O. Henry, which he informed everyone was chosen when a friend suggested choosing a name from the society columns of a New Orleans newspaper. Hence they found the surname. He wanted something short for a first name and, when the same friend suggested an initial, opted for 'O' as it was "about the easiest letter written".
Despite this explanation it did not stop two others offering quite different explanations. William Trevor stating the inspiration was Ohio State Penitentiary prison guard Orrin Henry, while Guy Davenport wrote it was to be found in the name of OHio state pENitentiaRY.

Idries Shah wrote The Teachers of Gurdjieff under the pen name of Rafael Lefort, held to have been chosen as an anagram of "a real effort".

Stephen King's early career saw him penning more than the one book per year which publishers were willing to put out, considering it would flood the market and be effectively competing with other Stephen King works. The author approached the publisher and suggested releasing others under a pseudonym and, in an attempt to discover if his success was down to talent or luck, did as little as possible to market the writings of Richard Bachman. Originally opting for the name of his maternal grandfather, he chose Richard as a tribute to fellow author Donald Westlake's pen name Richard Stark, while Bachman honoured Bachman-Turner-Overdrive, a rock band Stephen King just happened to be listening to at that time.

Hector Hugh Monroe wrote under the name of Saki. While no explanation was offered as to where he derived this pen name, there are two quite plausible explanations as to the source. Saki is a character, the cup bearer, in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and is stated as 'fact' in the 1978 anthology by Emlyn Williams. The central character in Munro's work The Remoulding of Groby Lington is a monkey, described as 'a small, long-tailed monkey from the Western Hemisphere'. There is a monkey which fits this description, a native of South America known as a saki.

An Advent Calendar of the Written Word (18th to 24th)

The final week featuring a note for each day of advent. No chocolates or pictures in this calendar but perhaps something of interest to the wordsmith.

18th - it seems many studies have been conducted into spelling errors. While it impossible to believe any examination can have taken a large enough sample in order to make the study particularly accurate, it seems the 18th most common wrongly spelled word is ASSOCIATION. Amazingly it was not the 's' or the 'c' which proved the stumbling blocks, the most common wrong spelling was "assocation".

19th - it probably won't come as a surprise to discover there are no 19-letter English words beginning with J, K, V, X, Y, or Z. However the most exhaustive of searches also drew a blank for 19-letter words beginning with W.

20th - to list the most common languages we can only use those spoken as a first language. Mandarin comes first, followed by Spanish and English. Twentieth on this list is either Korean or Tamil, both had 66 million speakers at the last respective census but those were taken some years apart.

21st - the 21st novel written by Terry Pratchett was Jingo, one of his Discworld series.

22nd - based on the list of best-selling magazines in the UK during the first half of 2011, 22nd on the list (with 413,311 copies) is Hello! magazine.

23rd - as it's Christmas a look at the all-time best-selling books for children reveals the paperback at number 23 is Judy Blume's Superfudge; while the classic The Tale of Benjamin Bunny by Beatrix Potter is ranked 23rd.

24th - in the Old Testament the 24th word is 'the'; the New Testament 'and'; in the Quran 'is', the Torah 'upon', and in the Book of Mormon 'many'.

An Advent Calendar of the Written Word (11th to 17th)

The second of three weeks featuring a note for each day of advent. No chocolates or pictures in this calendar but perhaps something of interest to the wordsmith.

11th - the 11th December is the anniversary of the birth (1918) of the Russian writer, Nobel winner and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who died in 2008.

12th - has to be Twelfth Night for this was my one and only appearance as a thespian (although to be accurate there were two performances) when I had the role of Malvolio forced upon me by a teacher. Should 'Happy' Richmond still be around to recall those (for me) endless weeks of torture, my loathing for you is undiminished.

13th - the 13th this month fell on a Tuesday, yet had it fallen on a Friday all manner of woes and ill fortune may have been blamed on something which can only happen a maximum of three times each year in the Gregorian calendar. However spare a thought for Spanish-speaking countries where Friday the 13th passes unnoticed as it is Tuesday the 13th, or Martres trece, which is feared. Incidentally, statistics show these unlucky 13ths (be they Fridays or Tuesdays) are likely to see a significant drop in accidents.

14th - the 14th letter in the alphabet is 'n', the sixth most common letter used in the English language but as a consonant second only to 't'. The development of the letter 'n' seems to have been from the adaptation of the Egyptian snake heiroglyph by Semitic people, their word for a snake beginning with the 'n' sound.

15th - the 15th best-selling daily newspaper in the world, with an average daily circulation of some 2,204,000 is Japan's Sankei Shimbun. However it ranks only 7th among Japan's dailies, indeed the five best-sellers in the world are all Japanese. Incidentally 15th on the United Kingdom list is the Manchester Evening News.

16th - Barbara Cartland has the longest entry in Who's Who, mostly a list of her books, the 16th of which appeared in 1937, a contemporary romance novel entitled But Never Free (aka The Adventurer). Incidentally at the time of her death there were some 160 unpublished works

17th - the 17th book of the Bible is Esther. As an English name Esther became popular in the 17th century, when it was the 17th most common name given to a baby girl.

An Advent Calendar of the Written Word (1st to 10th)

Over the next three weeks a note for each day of advent. No chocolates or pictures in this calendar but perhaps a snippet of interest to the wordsmith, writer or reader.

1st - the most valuable first edition is the Gutenberg Bible, currently valued at over £30 million but you probably haven't got one of the 21 copies thought to exist. My oldest first edition is a book by Thornton W. Burgess entitled Little Joe Otter. The copy I was given as a child disappeared and I was delighted to receive a 1925 edition for Christmas a few years ago.

2nd - few will be unaware the Bible is the best selling book of all time and outsells the second best seller six or seven times over. Yet few will know that next on the list is Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, most often referred to as his 'little red book'.

3rd - the third most commonly used letter in English writings is 'a', accounting for 8.167% of the total.

4th - the fourth longest English novel ever published is Poor Fellow My Country, a tale set in Australia and written by Xavier Herbert. It is said to contain 850,000 words.

5th - the fifth best-selling fiction author ever has amassed some 600 million copies of an impressive 800 books, and including 3,400 translations. Most of those books appeared under her own name and, although she did sometimes use the pseudonym Mary Pollock, very few can have missed Enid Blyton's work as a child or later as a parent.

6th - the complete works of Shakespeare did not see the light of day until seven years after his death and the publication of his plays certainly does not reflect the order in which they were first performed. As the latter is a better indication of the chronology his 6th play can be said to be Titus Andronicus, first performed in 1593 and appearing in print the following year.

7th - the Guardian newspaper poll to find the Seven Wonders of the Literary World placed Homer's The Odyssey at number seven - Don Quixote topped the list.

8th - in June 2011 John Locke became the 8th person to sell a million copies of an ebook and the first to self-publish and reach this milestone

9th - once it was considered a worthwhile achievement to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica - Richard Byrd taking a copy to the South Pole to help the time pass during his five-months stay - none other than literary giant George Bernard Shaw himself said he had read the 9th edition, although he admitted to skipping the scientific articles (a rather significant chunk to leave out).

10th - I suppose one of the golden rules when editing is to remove 'that' as superfluous. Thus it is interesting to note it is the tenth most commonly used English word and therefore should certainly appear in 'that' dialogue.

Right Place at the Right Time

This week has seen the final touches applied to both North Devon Place Names and South Devon Place Names, while Dorset Place Names will also be printed and packed up before the end of this week. As the end of the calendar year approaches so does the deadlines to finish the final two books for which I have contracts.

Next week I shall be delivering the three finished manuscripts and illustrations, while continuing on to Somerset to spend a couple of days seeking out 40 or 50 decent illustrations and those snippets and anecdotal gems which make a book out of what would otherwise be a dictionary of place names.

I have also been invited to speak at another three venues, a local history group in Staffordshire in March, a group of metal detectorists at the beginning of February, and I am to be on the list for the 14th Annual Literary Festival in Wellington, Shropshire in October of next year.

This week I also learned, albeit probably later than most authors, that Amazon have introduced Kindle Stores, a way for authors to list their work digitally. The eBook can then be uploaded on payment of an agreed amount - not all have to be books, of course, articles, poems, songs, music, jokes, even money-saving tips. Rest assured I shall be investigating the potential here and reporting back for like all authors I have a number of items which I consider worthy of publication but have yet to find the right niche.

Often that is the case, not that the piece is substandard but is being offered to the wrong place and/or at the wrong time. Some years ago I had had a book proposal accepted, contracts signed, written and page proofs had even been printed and edited. It was when we were clearing up the final queries that something interesting came to light. Among the paperwork for the book proposal I found a letter of mine offering the idea for that book to the same publisher. Pinned to the back was a polite rejection of the idea, dated nine months before the idea was accepted. Even more surprising the letter came from the same person working at the same company. Which proves if you are satisfied you cannot improve upon the piece and still keep receiving rejections no matter how well you tailor your writing to suit the publication or publisher, it still has to be looked at by the right person at the right time.