Diction Drops & Spikes

As of this year, the second Monday of the month is dedicated to my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.

Thanks to the Battle of Hastings of 1066! Because it is a blend of languages, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, English offers unusual facility for diction drops and spikes, and you, dear writerly reader, if you care to dare, can employ these for a richly dazzling array of effects. Irony, comedy, sarcasm, intimacy, poignancy, revelation, poetry, punch, sass, shock... it's a long list and I'm sure that you can make it longer.

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Here, taken from a few favorite books and blogs, are some examples of diction spikes-- that is, a sudden rise in the level of formality of vocabulary and syntax (wherein it all gets very elliptically Latinate)-- and drops-- gettin' funky with the grammar and using short, sharp words.

See if you can spot the spikes and drops. I separate them out for you below the quotes.

"What then, does one do with one's justified anger? Miss Manners' meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose. They generally work. When they fail, she has the ability to dismiss inferior behavior from her mind as coming from inferior people. You will perhaps points out that she will never know the joy of delivering a well-deserved sock in the chops. True-- but she will never inspire one, either."

-- Judith Martin, Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

SPIKE: "What then, does one do with one's justified anger? Miss Manners' meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose."
DROP : "sock in the chops"

"Department of Transportation engineers explained that aluminum highway signs bore a chemical film which kept them from oxidizing. And that the film over time formed a halo effect, a light-purple tinge which migrated to stress points on the metals' surface. The regional maintentance engineer didn't think the sign looked a bit like the Virgin, by the way. You must of had to use your imagination. Though maybe, he admitted, he was unenlightened. The manager of the plant that supplied the aluminum sheets assured everyone that they weren't treated by monks or anything. It was done by a bunch of folks in Alabama."

-- Philip Garrison, "La Reconquisita of the Inland Empire"

SPIKE: "Department of Transportation engineers explained that aluminum highway signs bore a chemical film which kept them from oxidizing. And that the film over time formed a halo effect, a light-purple tinge which migrated to stress points on the metals' surface."
DROP:  "...didn't think the sign looked a bit like the Virgin, by the way. You must of had to use your imagination..."
SPIKE:  "The manager of the plant that supplied the aluminum sheets assured everyone..."
DROP: "...they weren't treated by monks or anything. It was done by a bunch of folks in Alabama."

"As I thought about composing a new blog post over the past couple of weeks, I resisted the idea of writing about wildfire, even as the topic claimed a growing share of mind day after day. For one thing, I've touched the subject before. For another, yet another blog bemoaning the lack of precipitation seemed tiresome. Plus, well, geez: fires are such a downer."

-- Andrea Jones, "Out of the Background" in "Between Urban and Wild" blog, July 4, 2018

SPIKE:  "...bemoaning the lack of precipitation seemed tiresome."
DROP: "Plus, well, geez: fires are such a downer."

"When I was a young man in the 1970s, New York was on its ass. Bankrupt. President Gerald Ford told panhandling Mayor Abe Beame to "drop dead." Nothing was being cared for. The subway cars were so grafitti-splattered you could hardly find the doors or see out the windows. Times Square was like the place Pinocchio grew donkey ears. Muggers lurked in the shadows of Bonwit Teller on 57th and Fifth. These were the climax years of the post-war (WWII) diaspora to the suburbs. The middle class had been moving out of the city for three decades leaving behind the lame, the halt, the feckless, the clueless, and the obdurate 'risk oblivious' cohort of artsy bohemians for whom the blandishments of suburbia were a no-go state of mind. New York seemed done for."

-- James Howard Kunstler, "The Future of the City"

DROP: "...New York was on its ass."
DROP: "drop dead."
SPIKE: "These were the climax years of the post-war (WWII) diaspora to the suburbs. The middle class had been moving out of the city for three decades leaving behind the lame, the halt, the feckless, the clueless, and the obdurate 'risk oblivious' cohort of artsy bohemians for whom the blandishments of suburbia were a no-go state of mind."
DROP: "New York seemed done for."


P.S. More resources for writers on my workshop page, including "Giant Golden Buddha" and 364 More Five Minute Writing Exercises.


> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

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Top Ten Books Read 2010

1. Finding Iris Chang
by Paula Kamen
Iris Chang was the author of three books, including the blockbuster The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII. Kamen, also an accomplished journalist and author of four books, was first Iris's rival at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana and then, for many years, an admiring and close friend. Kamen's is a book by a writer about a writer, or rather, the biography of a rich and evolving writerly friendship with a violent end, for Iris Chang was found shot to death in a car by the side of the road near her home in northern California. Chang was then working on a book about the Bataan Death March, and as she had a small son, a happy marriage, and blazingly successly career, many people found it easy to believe she had been murdered, though, as Kamen explains at length, Chang's life was not what it appeared. Kamen's is a deeply moving book that should be read by anyone who is or would be a writer; it's a terrible lesson in the dangers of unbalanced ambition and, at the same time, ironically, the advantages of unbounded ambition. Beautifully written and researched, this is a work to be savored, both on the page, and in many meditations afterwards. I know I will be rereading this one.

2. The Big Short
By Michael Lewis
I relished Lewis's late 1980s memoir of working at Salmon Brothers, Liar's Poker, which I would describe as laugh-out-loud funny and grimly picaresque. The Big Short is equally entertaining, but, well, not funny. It is in fact horrifying. Unlike many books on financial shenanigans, this one is written by someone who actually worked in investment banking, who has an insider's understanding of the culture and the mentality of those, alas, not so few, who aim to "game the system." So what happened to the financial system in 2008? To begin to understand, start here.

2. When a Crocodile Ate the Sun
by Peter Godwin
It might seem an exotic horror story: Mugabe's Zimbabwe. But it's so much larger than that. What transpires when the government really, truly, breaks down? How do you find bread when your money inflates to near-nothing? What happens to the old people? To the animals? The crops? And the names of things? In other words, this is a story at once ancient and ever-new, a story that, for as long human nature and human societies endure, we will go on telling in its thousands of permutations. But this time, this book, wow.

4. Las tentaciones de la dicha
by Agustín Cadena
Who is Agustín Cadena? Think: Franz Kafka meets Juan Rulfo meets Raymond Carver or, the Mexican Chekhov. But that's not quite right: he's unique. I've just finished translating one of the stories, "The Vampire"--- hope to have news soon about a home for that. And some excellent, though to me, unexpected news: this book was named one of the top books of 2010 by Mexican critic Carlos Olivares Baró.

P.S. Read my translation of an earlier short story by Cadena, "Lady of the Seas," which appears in Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion.

4. The Bolter
by Frances Osborne
A superbly written biography of Idina Sackville, "the woman who scandalized 1920s Society and became White Mischief's infamous seductress," by her own great granddaughter. Every chapter is a surprise, and the last one more than any. (Oddly, this gave me a more nuanced appreciation for the decor in the Ralph Lauren shops.)

5. John Bankhead Magruder: A Military Reappriasal
by Thomas M. Settles
This new biography of a key 19th century military figure, best known as a controversial Confederate general who defended Virginia and Galveston,Texas in the U.S. Civil War, it is also crucial reading for anyone interested in the U.S.-Mexican War, the Civil War, and / or Mexico's Second Empire.

6. Black Robes in Paraguay
by William F. Jaenike
This magnificent, deeply and scrupulously researched book will always have a place of honor in my library. It should interest anyone who enjoys Latin American history -- and that includes the history of Mexico's Baja California, because of the parallel stories of their Jesuit missions.

7. Move Into Life: The Nine Essentials of Lifelong Vitality
by Anat Baniel
Protégée of Moishe Feldenkrais, the Israeli engineer and Judo expert who developed the renowned "Feldenkrais Method," Anat Baniel built her own "Anat Baniel Method" (ABM) on this foundation and three decades of helping thousands of people, from the tiniest babies to elders, move more easily and find freedom from pain. I have tried the ABM: gadzooks, it works! This book is a fine introduction to the method, and all-around inspiring. P.S. Her video beats a cup of coffee.

8. The Art of Intuition
by Sophy Burnham
A broad and knowledgable overview of issues related to and methods for accessing intuition, this is a most unusual book because it is written by a mystic and a literary artist: one and same person. Though Burnham is best known for her New York Times best-selling books on angels, some of her earlier books, especially The Art Crowd and The Landed Gentry, deserve far more recognition than they have yet received.

9. The Permit That Never Expires
by Philip Garrison
Anyone who wants to understand Mexican immigration should read this book -- and it's a gripping read, for Garrison is at once stylish, unusually perceptive, wryly humorous, and, above all, both compassionate and deeply knowledgeable. This is an astonishingly original and important work.

10. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
by Clay Shirky
I don't know Clay Shirky but, from his description of his childhood, we could have been next door neighbors, for I too recall hours planted, zombie-like, in front of Batman and Gilligan's Island. So what happens to our culture as a whole when we move from passive to active-- even for the merest smidgen of time? As they used to say on Batman, "sha-zam!" (Only Clay Shirky could get me to sign up for LOL Cats. Oh, yes, it was a-meow-zing.)

---> Top 10 Books Read 2009
---> Top 10 Books Read 2008
---> Top 10 Books Read 2007
---> Top 10 Books Read 2006
More anon.