Cold Turkey

Sadly, being British, I have no turkey-related festival this week. On the other hand, next week end I’m going to Copenhagen to poke at rune stones and drink mulled wine (in a yearly ritual with my dad and brother) so it’s not all bad.

I’m still jobless and PhD-less, although I still have hope – in the same way that someone clinging on to a precipice by their shredding fingernails as hope – but still hope. Four writing days left of NaNoWriMo, and I think I can get there. I’d be more on target if it weren’t for being woken up at 3 in the morning of Tuesday. Phone calls in the middle of the night are rarely good things, so when my mum called me at 3 in the morning at my dad’s house, I was pretty much paralysed with fear – especially when she asked me if I could get my dad to run her to hospital.

Anyway, it wasn’t a life-changing thing: she had a suspected pending detached retina which turned out to be a vitreous detachment. After all the fuss, bother and angst (not to mention looking after my mum’s cat-herding Border Collie), writing rather went out of the window.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I finished Sin by Sharon Page, which was very enjoyable, and reminded me that I haven’t read enough historical romances in a while.

I also read Gossip Girl: You Know You Love Me, in one of my forays into YA fiction. I like the TV series, I really do, although it’s not in my usual line of things (BtVS, Angel, West Wing, BSG, B5, and other geeky goodies). And I liked the first Gossip Girl book (in a I-can’t-read-to-many-of-these way), but this was unbearable. I had a real problem with the fact that I hated almost every character: I accept that most of us look back at our teenager years and cringe, but this seemed to take every facet of this and condense it. Almost without exception, the characters were selfish, spoilt, stupid and self-involved. As the narrator was one of them, there was nothing to cut through this, to give it narrative edge, to provide a contrasting view point. And without a character about whom I could honestly give a shit, there was no strong narrative thread. Instead, it read as a long litany of pointless, selfish, shallow episodes in which even the most sympathetic character was at best a puppet of circumstance. Even if this is a true record of the lives of the Upper East Side, it’s bad narrative.

At the other end of the scale, I’m about 100 pages into ‘The Quantum Rose’ by Catherine Asaro, a romantic science fiction novel (as opposed to sci fi romance or futuristic romance) which I can’t recommend highly enough. There is all the emotion and drama of soft sci fi, and the science which most hard sci fi only aspires too. In fact, I want to recommend this book to my brother, who’s a particle physicist (little brother ). The chapters and many of the concepts are based around quantum physical ideas (the author has a PhD in Chemical Physics). You can immerse yourself in this physics, or you can ignore it entirely, depending on what you want, but it forms a sci fi world which is complex and interesting without being inhuman. Despite Brother Dearest, I don’t know as much about quantum physics as I should, but I have recently taken a course in planetary science, and it was great for me to see the concepts I learnt there applied in sci fi. So far, this is a beautiful book, and Vyrl is a truly gorgeous hero. I would love to be able to do half as well, and it is a relief after Gossip Girl. The latter was supposed to be escapism during NaNo and failed; I wouldn’t exactly call The Quantum Rose escapism either, but it did rather prove that genre fiction can be as beautiful and profound as any modern literature.

To Write

For my first post I bring you… a brief history of the verb to write. This is, of course, in lieu of actually doing any writing. I’m procrastinating madly to avoid NaNo word counts (and unblocking the drains with a substance that I’m pretty sure will turn the flesh of my hands into soap if I splash it on myself, a process which I’m sure is pretty damn painful if you’re the soapee).

So… on to the linguistic pretty:

According to this website, the modern word write comes from the Old English strong verb writan (to score, outline, or draw a figure of, as well as to write), which has cognates in a bunch of other Germanic languages, including Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old Norse. All these words are, unsurprisingly, not very different from the English and OE words, and mainly differ in whether they have the w in front (although the OHG is quite different, because German’s strange that way. )

This in turn comes from the Proto-Germanic verb *writanan, and there it stops. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary tries to go a bit further and suggest a PIE root *wreid-, to tear or scratch. Perhaps not the most interesting etymology, but it amuses me anyway.

In contrast, the Latin verb scribo is a bit well-travelled, as words go. It is thought (all of this is educated guesswork, a bit like planetary science, composed thoughts like ‘well, it would make sense…’) scribo, which gives us the words scribe and script, comes from the Indo-European root *skribh, which meant to cut, separate or sift according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Like write, scribo originally meant to scratch or incise before it came to mean write. The online etymological dictionary also tells me that the Greek word skariphasthai is to scratch or sketch, along with various other related words. On the other hand, Germanic borrowed scribo, so that it became *skriban. The Old English cognate term scrifan meant to allot or assign, which gives us the word shrive. Mmmm… Shrove Tuesday. Pancakes!!! From inscriptions to pancakes in a few easy steps.

I’ll stop now before I scare people away. As I get used to this, I hope to make my occasional linguistic diversions less dry and crusty. Etymology makes me so ridiculously happy, that I tend not to notice the people sitting there with their heads in their hands. I haven’t marked length in the linguistic roots given here because, quite frankly, I’m feeling lazy today, but I’ll try and get some length marks in the next time.

This was all inspired by discovering Scrivener which I want almost painfully much, and which might make the mess of this story come a little clearer.