The Wretched Scribbler

The Wretched Scribbler blog features posts about writing, research, publishing, books, media, communications, idea platforms, idea entrepreneurs, and the people, projects, clients, and original concepts of Idea Platforms, Inc. Comments welcome.

IPI Lexicon

Posted Tue, 07/27/2010 - 11:43am by Hannah AA

When I was in college, we used to talk about “OEDing.” As in OED (verb): to determine the etymology, significance, and usage of a word in the Oxford English Dictionary online. As in, “I just OEDed “penultimate” and it cannot be used in that way.”

(Penultimate (adj.) means “The last but one in a series of things.” As in, from the New York Times, “The play's penultimate sequence, set in a boxcar, is a shocker.”)

At IPI, the OED is our final authority on word usage. “Can you be mired in a rut?” I ask John. “OED it.” (You can, but it’s unlikely. A rut is a “deep furrow or track,” while “to be mired” implies mud or swampy ground.) While some of our publishers prefer Merriam-Webster’s (11th edition) for its relative simplicity, we like the breadth, the examples, and the etymology offered by the OED. (Mire, from early Scandinavian, shares its roots with the Icelandic mýri and the Swedish, Dutch, and Danish myr.)

It’s true that we like the OED because it adds to our aura of intelligence. (Aura: from the Greek for “breeze.” As from the Glasgow Herald: “The genteel aura of the upper circle.”) And it allows us to avoid potentially awkward occasions of misuse or misunderstanding. We have been known to send office memos with links to the OED, warning each other of potential vocabulary pitfalls.

Sometimes, though, even the OED lets us down. The OED lists several meanings of the verb “shank,” including “to travel on foot,” “to sink (a shaft),” or “to knit stockings.” But it fails to describe the definition that brought us to the OED in the first place (“To stab someone quickly and repeatedly in the side or lower back, usually with a shiv or, occasionally, a spork.”) (A shiv, according to the OED, is a razor.)

As for the verb OED, it’s still not in the OED. But you can find it on urbandictionary.com: “verb (transitive), to consult the OED for the meaning of a word. As in: "‘What the heck does 'absquatulation'* mean?’

‘I dunno - oed it’”

*to decamp

The Comma Coma

Posted Mon, 07/19/2010 - 11:12am by Hannah AA

We always love it when Andi steps off his corporate jet to write a guest post for our blog. But I especially appreciated last week’s post about athletics because it reminded me of another favorite summer sport: copyediting.

Last week, I was part of an extensive e-mail string on the subject of the serial comma, which is the comma that goes before the final item in a list. “I like grammar, punctuation, and spelling,” I say. Or is it: “I like grammar, punctuation and spelling?” The serial comma, also known as the Harvard or Oxford comma, caused one writer (poet Robert Francis) to complain, “When I got to Harvard, no one had ever heard of the comma!”

This week we received the copyedited version of one of our manuscripts, prompting a flurry of editorial debates. Although historians say that English writing has been systematic since the middle ages, consistency remains hard to come by. Serial commas are simple compared to the use of ellipses in block quotes, the thin spaces between quotation marks, or the relative placement of punctuation around parentheses. And don’t get me started on the subject of apostrophes at the end of acronyms. (When you have more than one CEO, do you have CEOs, CEO’s, or a problem?) John likes to quote the epitaph on a successful editor’s gravestone: “Changed which to that.”

Some might say that obsessive copyediting is dehumanizing, or worse. Anna was telling me about Roald Dahl’s short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” in which a man discovers the algorithm for good literature and invents a novel-making machine. The reduction of writing to rules and regulation results in the end of human creativity. It’s a tragic story.

But it’s not my story. In reviewing our copyedited manuscript, we spotted occasions where a misplaced comma or inaccurate punctuation changed the meaning of our writing, sometimes dramatically. Because words are an author’s only medium for communication, writers are dependent on the accuracy of their punctuation. And in my opinion, great writers are those who know how to create magnificent phrases out of the mundane. They do it with style.

 

 

Swock!

Posted Fri, 07/09/2010 - 9:38am by andivonravi

I am not exactly a jock, but I do enjoy sports, especially ones that are essentially business in disguise.
There are three of these that interest me the most: golf, tennis, and jousting.

We have been told, mostly by players themselves, that golf is one of the most challenging of mental games, that it tests one’s powers of concentration like nothing else. CEO’s, in particular, cannot get enough of it. Others maintain that golf is primarily a social activity, claiming that more business deals are closed on the green than in the conference room. Both may be true, but I see another value in golf. There is really nothing quite so satisfying as the sound of a club head smacking the face of a ball and blasting it two or three hundred yards down the fairway. It’s almost as fulfilling as a successful product launch, a million hits on the website, or firing somebody who really has to go.

Tennis. Management guru Peter Drucker likened doubles tennis to teamwork, a game in which he said “every member adapts to the other.” But no one cares about doubles. Singles is where it’s at and the really great thing there is the technology, especially the racket. Once again, you’ve got the thwack of string against helpless ball and the tremendous feeling of power as it distorts into an oval shape and spins away from you. You: boss. Ball: the issue you would like to fix, once and for all.

Jousting. Well, it is just beginning to take hold as the business sport of choice around the world. But the appeal is so obvious and simple: armor. Who ― male or female ― doesn’t look great in a helmet, cuirasse, and steel codpiece? Add a horse and you can gain what my friend George Stalk would call an unfair competitive advantage.

Of course, the best thing about all sports, and why businesspeople like them even more than business itself, is the beauty of keeping score. Who wins and who loses is indisputable, black and white, all in the final addition. In business, there’s always the nagging suspicion that the numbers are somehow lying, because they often are.

 

The Publishing iPocalypse

Posted Mon, 06/28/2010 - 9:59am by Hannah AA

The prophets have spoken: a literary apocalypse is on its way. Garrison Keillor says, “Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea.” Environmental writer Dave Gessner sees the future as a Terminator-like dystopia, complete with robots called Nielsen Bookscan and The Kindle and Google Books. Gessner also drew this illustration:

In the foreground, in a cave, is the wretched scribbler, looking slightly the worse for wear. The bones of other wretched scribblers are strewn in the field and buried under the last of the live oaks. One poor reader, paperback in hand, is writhing in the grip of what I imagine to be a modified iPad.

We appreciate the nostalgia that writers hold for their imagined past (Keillor is the acknowledged master of the good old days). But we see a different future for the world’s scribblers, wretched and otherwise. Because we believe, first, that the “apocalypse” is already upon us. And, second, that it’s opening up a brave new world of opportunity for writers and artists of all breeds.

Let the collaborations begin.

So far we’ve written about collaboration primarily in terms of the writing process. But what we see in the digital future is a world where the interface between the written word and other media, like pictures, like sound, and like video, disappears. When that happens, books will by necessity become the collaborative product of a team of cinematographers and app developers, animators and writers.

The result? A new breed of books that is a little bit more like A Prairie Home Companion, which combines prose, poetry, and music, and is currently streamed online. Or like Dave Gessner’s blog, which incorporates multiple authors, audience participation, and smoothly integrated illustrations.

We’ll keep you posted as we begin developing some of our own media enriched digital book projects. Meanwhile, for our next blog cycle, we will be writing about the places where we see writers using new media to their collaborative advantage. We think it’s time to move beyond the doomsday vision of a literary wasteland. Remember, the first brave new world wasn’t a dystopia at all. It was Shakespeare’s Miranda, looking beyond her isolated island for the first time. “How beauteous mankind is!” she cries. “O brave new world, that has such people in’t!”