All the Fun of the Affair

A sideways look at age, Blogging, Colin McQueen - writer, Getting Older, Humour, Memories, My Life, Real life through the kaleidoscope of age 4 Minutes

I have this love affair with words.  I can do what I like with them (mis-spell, mis-use, incorrectly hyphenate…) and they seldom object.  (And when they do it is generally through this whatever-it-is that is embedded in Microsoft Word with the specific purpose of driving me half crazy: I know it’s a f*cking fragment, it’s how I write and no, I wouldn’t consider changing it!)  I’m actually pretty nailed on with spelling (although restaurant is, for some reason, always problematic for me) and my apostrophe use is definitely superior to whomsoever (whosoever, apparently) wrote the algorithm for Microsoft.  I love a bit of anthimeria – which the algorithm obviously believes is a word I have just invented – or possibly anthimeriaing.  Shakespeare, apparently, was a great verber, and if he never considered using Gerund as a character name, well, he dashed well should have (or, as everybody says around here, ‘should of’).  I will freely admit, I do like making up the odd word here and there: if it suits what I have to say, and it says it, then I use it.  If it doesn’t appear in the dictionary, well, perhaps it’s not just me who needs to get his act together. I am not alone.  Lewis Carroll, for instance, was a great maker-upper of words – although, strangely, I have just looked up paedophile and it wasn’t one of his. 

Grammar, unfortunately, is an entirely different kettle of frogs.  My use of grammar could best be described as ‘instinctive’ (as was the reaction of many of my English Tutors over the years): I tend to read things out aloud and if I pause, I stick a comma in.  If I stop, I stick in a full stop.  If I pause, just a little longer than a comma’s-worth, but don’t quite stop, then it is a semi-colon.  A colon, in my head, is simply an abbreviation for ‘such as’ or ‘such that’.  And parentheses (surely not parenthesises) I just drop in wherever I might have an extra idea to plop into a sentence, which is not catered for within my aforementioned basic grammatical rulebook.  I understand ‘verb’, ‘adverb’, ‘noun’, ‘pronoun’, ‘adjective’ and a little bit about ‘prepositions’, unlike ‘conjunctions’, and interjections which are well hard!  Beyond that, anything that requires more than a single word descriptor completely passes me by.  I don’t remember ever being taught these things.  I suppose I must have been, although I am certain that I have never known them.  Appositive phrases are completely out of reach to me.

I had an English teacher at school who dedicated his entire life (or so it seemed to me at the time – I’m sure he must have done other things) to chopping my long and florid sentences down into tiny, grammatically correct chunks with his own, equally florid, green ink revisions (although I still think that Word would call the resulting pithy blocks ‘fragments’) and all of my all-of-a-suddens into suddenlys (neither of which, apparently, can be pluralised).  His accuracy with the blackboard rubber is the main reason that I still, to this day, duck instinctively every time I am tempted to make a smartarse remark.  Consequently, my writing tends to veer wildly between the clipped and economical style that he tried to pound into my head and the convoluted mess that is more true to my nature and bloody-mindedness.  What’s the point in a sentence that you can read without having to think about it?  To get through many of mine, you might need a map.  If you reach the end of a sentence I have written with no idea of what I was trying to say at the start of it, it is probably because I have forgotten.

Also, for reasons that only a psychologist could explain, I do not like words such as learnt and dreamt, using learned and dreamed instead, both of which, I realise, are quite wrong, but sound much less ugly.  You may have noticed, I also use the ‘ise’ suffix in preference to the ‘ize’ espoused by the OED, apparently putting me at odds with Shakespeare and Tolkien, which I am sure will really bother them.  In ‘real life’, I am an inveterate and accomplished swearer, but I seldom swear in print because it looks so bloody unsightly.  I wrote a novel once in which every character was deeply flawed and ultimately unpleasant.  The worst of them swore as much on the page as I do in real life.  He was an ugly person and his dialogue disfigured the text to such an extent that I had to find something really unpleasant to do to him.  Oddly, I read it through a week or two ago and, with an appropriate distance between then and now, it actually made me laugh.  I believe that I have read many worse novels – although I could, as always, be very wrong about this – and I wish that I had pursued my search for a publisher rather more assiduously than I did, but I didn’t.  Even today I wish that I had the patience to pursue it, but I don’t (I am allergic to rejection: it brings me out in self-pity and I can’t afford the whisky).  I do wonder if my tortuous syntax might not be an impediment to literary success.  I’m not sure that this can be the whole reason for my stratospheric level of failure, as I have read many a best seller that has, in my opinion, needed some kind of preface from Bletchley Park in order to make it coherent and, unless I am particularly stupid*, there are many ‘great books’ out there that would have not made it beyond my own ‘could I read this in a deckchair’ test.  I am unable to tackle a single sentence in Ulysses without a pencil and notepad.

Anyway, I appear to have drifted somewhat from my charted journey here; the point is – or was, it seems so long since I started this – that I love words (even if my method of linking them together leaves much to be desired) and I love using them (my latest dreadful habit: using italics for expression) and that is the main reason why I continue to write this blog after all this time.  I hope you understand and can forgive…

*Author’s Note: I am particularly stupid.

Published by colinmcqueen

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20 thoughts on “All the Fun of the Affair”

  2. A contribution from pedant’s corner. I’m with you in disliking ‘should of’ – I assume it comes from ‘should’ve’ which could be taken to sound as much like ‘should of’ as ‘should have’? I also don’t like nouns as verbs – but they say language is a living and evolving thing and how many of us want to speak Shakespearian English? As has also been said ‘I guess there ain’t no noun that can’t be verbed’.

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  3. I’m with you… challenging the red wavey underlines, and giving the spellcheck and grammer checkers a fit is half the fun. English being packed with so many donor words form other languages, corruptions of same, and one word often used for at least twenty different meanings, is so useful for playing with readers heads too.

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  6. For a moment there when I read your title I was thinking there might be a cross-blogging going on between you and Mr. Underfelt but I agree with you. After I read your post I think you are right on target. I read a sentence I wrote and do the same things with commas and other punctuation.
    And yes, it’s “should have” not “of” which is ridiculous. As to the -ise versus -ize I didn’t know that there was an OED entry on that, I just figured it was that American English/English English thing again.

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    1. OED insist on ‘ize’ but it just looks ugly. I’m not sure which is English/English, but I have a feeling that (on this one occasion 😉) we have backed the wrong one.

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  7. So much I agree on. I look at shi- stuff wot I write and I let so much go with the flow. If a sentence is more like a paragraph and it has more dashes and dots running through it than the carpet leading to Little Miss Proclaims training potty – well that’s how I wrote it. So, right or wrong that is how it looks and sounds in my noggin. Ize/ise is whatever falls from my fingers, words are here to be bent and misshapen to the will/whims of the writer and if Spellcheck don’t- does not- like it -well, (insert vernacular here) ’em. Apposite of apostrophe use- I gave up even trying. If one is in the wrong place, ‘Sorry, Mr Greenpencil Sir, but it will happen again.’ Those little buggery apostrophes are my main blind spot. So just consider my ill-use of apostrophes as a catastrophe that is, shall and willfully going to continually happen.
    One thing though;-;… although I’m no spell-err I die a little inside when I’m subjected two blatant missteaks. Thanks four listening, yore obsequious less-than-savant, Obbverse.

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  8. I laughed out (a)loud at the Lewis Carroll statement! When it comes to grammar I do what I bloody-well like. Spelling I’m good at and can spell restaurant, but NEVER vechile or rehersal.

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  9. My Grammer Baked cookies. You just write what you like and let Microsoft be darned., I ave typed lines from Shakespere into Word and it is nothing but mistakes. If word thinks his genius is bad then you’re doing the right thing. Merry Hat uh Lid Tell Lam BTW this passes Spellcheck
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    Laugh Well and Often!!

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  10. Hi Colin,
    Believe me, this is one post where you were closest to the point. Your writing style reminds me of Jerome K. Jerome who started writing a travel journal of a journey on boat through river Thames. He added so many anecdotes and puns that it ended up being one of the funniest novels ever: Three Men in a Boat. The point is, I like the way you write.
    Grammar is my pain point. I have dealt with it for 12 years in school + 2 years in college. I dumped English subject in the final year because Grammar gave me goosebumps. I patted myself in the back that day. My first day into this job, which is all about grammar and short sentences, and editing and rewriting stuff other people had written, I received Grammar sessions and assignments for one month straight and recurring sessions ever since. Prepositions and Interjections were always my enemies, but I am surprised at the hostility from Articles. I always thought a, an, the were rather quiet beings…
    Colons almost costed me half my variable pay once! Semi-colons, I throw out of window whenever I can. Exclamation mark swears when it sees me. And Parenthesis…well did you know that brackets and parenthesis weren’t the same? Ugly twins! I hate grammar!
    I like the words you create. You are opening the world for the latest form of English, like Shakespeare did in his time.

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    1. Ha ha, thank you. I don’t think grammar and I will ever be great friends but, quite frankly, it will just have to put up with my eccentricities and do the best it can 😊. PS love three men in a boat and also it’s follow-up three men on a bummel – well worth a read if you haven’t already done so 👍🏻

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      1. I have read both and laughed for hours. Infact, Three Men in a Boat is my Bible. I carry it around whenever I go out on a journey and at home, when I am close to nervous breakdown (which is quite often, considering I am a mother). My husband doesnot understand why anybody would be attached to the same book for 11 years. I just tell him, he needs to read it to understand. Three Men on a Bummel–well, even I don’t understand why people would put their mail boxes up on a tree! I guess, their birds get mails too! 😀

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