Talk Wordy to Me

Here’s a word that seems to trip a lot of writers up: maelstrom. It is frequently misspelled as maelstorm. I think this is sometimes unintentional,with the brain grabbing the more familiar word storm as the fingers fly across the keyboard. But I think there is also genuine misunderstanding of the word, and it’s an understandable misunderstanding.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines maelstrom as:

• 1. A violent or turbulent situation: caught in the maelstrom of war.
• 2. A whirlpool of extraordinary size or violence.

Maelstrom is almost always used in that first sense, and the idea of likening a violent, turbulent situation to a storm makes a lot of sense. But the word’s roots are rooted to the second sense, which comes from Dutch.From the OED: “early modern Dutch maelstrom (obsolete, now maalstroom), meaning whirlpool, from malen, meaning to grind, to whirl round + stroom, meaning stream.”

From a recent New York Times obituary of L.J. Davis, a journalist and novelist: “Mr. Davis was known among friends and editors as affable and voluble, a man who arrived at every personal encounter equipped with a capacious store of unusual facts and anecdotes he was prepared to dispense at the slightest provocation.”

The sentence holds hints to the meaning of voluble, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “Marked by a ready flow of speech; fluent.” The AHD etymology: from the “Middle English, meaning moving easily, from Old French, from the Latin volūbilis, meaning revolving, fluent, from volvere, to roll.”

The AHD’s second definition for voluble touches on the older roots of the word:

• 2a. Turning easily on an axis; rotating.
• 2b. Botany. Twining or twisting: a voluble vine.

The OED also offers older meanings of voluble. Here are the ones that don’t overlap the AHD:

• 1. Liable to change; inconstant, variable, mutable. Now rare.
• 2a.  Capable of ready rotation on a centre or axis; apt to revolve or roll in this manner. Now rare.
• 2b. Of the eye: Moving readily. Obsolete.
• 2c. Capable of being rolled up.
• 3. Moving rapidly and easily, especially. with a gliding or undulating movement.

The Oxford Dictionaries Twitter feed (@OxfordWords) sends out a word of the day, and recently they had a pretty good one, dekko:

• noun. [in singular] British informal a quick look or glance: come and have a dekko at this.

The full OED says it is a slang word, originally Army slang, which makes sense, given that it comes from the “Hindi dekho, imperative of dekhnā, meaning to look.” The British colonial soldiers must have brought dekko home with them. The OED etymology compares dekko to its second entry on deck as a noun, a colloquialism it defines as “a look, peep.” It has similar roots, from the “Hindi dekha, meaning sight, dekhnā, meaning to see, look at.”

My mom, a fellow traveler in word-nerd circles, found an interesting table categorizing figures of speech and shared it with me the other day. And so I share it with you.

I personally like anaphora, anastrophe, and hypallage.

I really need to be doing my Kentucky taxes, but I made the mistake of scanning through Twitter before I started, and I came across a tweet from Kat Howard (@KatWithSword), a speculative fiction writer and professor whom I just started following yesterday:

• “I love all the smart, literate women (and men) chiming in to say how wrongheaded and offensive that NYT Game of Thrones review is.”

Well, I just HAD to go find the review. I am a huge fan of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series, and have been drooling in anticipation for this HBO show for a long time. (It starts Sunday night.)

You have to read the entire review to really understand this, but it seems the Times assigned someone to review this fantasy series who DOESN’T LIKE FANTASY. And yes, I understand that TV reviews in newspapers are done for a general audience, but the writer’s ignorance of the genre really hurts the review.

To wit:

• The bigger question, though, is: What is “Game of Thrones” doing on HBO?
• When [HBO] ventures away from its instincts for real-world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga “True Blood,” things start to feel cheap, and we feel as though we have been placed in the hands of cheaters. “Game of Thrones” serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot.
• If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort.

Really, especially, to the last one? (Ripping on D&D was old in the early 90s.) Most of the writer’s criticisms, aside from that touch on the sex scenes, could be applied to the Lord of the Rings, which as we all know was a huge flop. Oh wait, IT GROSSED $2.9 BILLION at the box office alone.

However, what Kat Howard was referring to was a particularly galling section in the middle of the review, which was written by a woman:

Like “The Tudors” and “The Borgias” on Showtime and the “Spartacus” series on Starz, “Game of Thrones,” is a costume-drama sexual hopscotch, even if it is more sophisticated than its predecessors. It says something about current American attitudes toward sex that with the exception of the lurid and awful “Californication,” nearly all eroticism on television is past tense. The imagined historical universe of “Game of Thrones” gives license for unhindered bed-jumping — here sibling intimacy is hardly confined to emotional exchange.

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

There are so many things wrong here, it’s time for more bullet points:

• First, when did sex scenes become “something for the ladies”? I thought it was men who needed to see the hot and heavy to hold our interests.
• Second, “no woman alive would watch otherwise”? Well, MY WIFE is one of the many many women I know who love the Game of Thrones books specifically, and fantasy in general, and she has been just as excited about this TV show. This is why I think it was a real mistake to have someone who obviously doesn’t read or watch fantasy or sci-fi to this review. I’m sorry that the writer is too sophisticated to have even EVER MET a woman who would rather read The Hobbit rather than the latest book-club fodder.
• Third, I don’t know what the show included sex-wise, but the Game of Thrones books actually have a lot of sex in them. So “all this illicitness” isn’t tossed in, it’s likely true to the original.
• (Updated to add): Fourth, sort of an addendum to the first point, the idea that women would only watch a fantasy series because it has sex in it? This doesn’t even make sense.
• *@#&!@*!@&!!!!!!
• Grumble.

That is all. I have to go do my taxes.

Updated to add: Some women who I follow on Twitter have sent me messages about how they love genre fiction. Here is one, reprinted with permission:

• Kristina Vragovic (@kvrag): ”Boy fiction”? This woman (!) is clearly out of touch. She should talk epics with me sometime. (She later added, “ Star Wars, LOTR… bring it.”)

I had a great T-shirt idea last night, but I cannot make it, for fear of George Lucas’ Iron Fist of Litigation:

(Image from Martin Menu’s Flickr stream and used under Creative Commons license. The text is my own.)

Last Friday’s Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day was pretty interesting:

derring-do. “Derring-do” (= daring action) derives, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, from a “chain of misunderstandings and errors.” Originally, the term was “dorryng do,” a verb phrase meaning “daring to do.” A 16th-century misprint in the poetry of John Lydgate (ca. 1370-1450) made it “derrynge do,” which Spenser (1579) misunderstood and used as a noun phrase meaning “manhood, chivalry.” Then Sir Walter Scott popularized the phrase in Ivanhoe (1820) with the spelling “derring-do,” and this has been the settled spelling ever since. But because of its historical and modern associations with “daring,” writers often use the erroneous spelling “daring-do.”