"Put him out of her mind. "

 

The Regency period was very short: nine years between 1811 and 1820, when the madness of King George III made him unfit to rule and his son stepped in as Regent. 

The author who made the Regency World her own, or indeed invented that world, wrote stories based upon and around the upper classes, their social lives, carriages and clothes and etiquette.  They have been incredibly popular since the 1950s. Her name was Georgette Heyer.

I’ve read one or two and enjoyed them. I’ve wondered if she made up all those phrases – a bag of moonshine, land a facer, in his altitudes

Heyer researched the period extensively and built up a library of a thousand reference books by the time she died. Her notes record things like how much candles cost in 1812 and it seems that authors who came after her used much of her writing as fact. Much of it can be checked today and probably more easily, thanks to Google, than when she did all those years ago.

My concern right now is how much of the language she used was real, and how much did she invent? I must ask the people who celebrate all thing Heyer on Twitter accounts such as the ones below. They may have the answer.

@georgettedaily Twitter account.

@HeyerSociety

@MissGHeyer

“She decided that her wisest course would be to put him out of her mind. After reaching this conclusion she lay thinking about him until at last she fell asleep.”

An Ethnic Enigma

An Ethnic Enigma – Norse, Pict and Gael in the Western Isles Andrew Jennings and Arne Kruse

Introduction

What happened to the native people of the islands of Scotland when the Vikings appeared over the horizon? Were the men killed and the womenfolk bundled on to the ships, leaving the land empty and ripe for resettlement? Or did they survive the Viking visitation living alongside the newcomers and ultimately blending with them? There is still no consensus about which scenario best approximates to the truth, despite it being, for many decades, a topic of debate between scholars.

Busy doing my research - mugging up on facts about Viking life in the years around the first millennium. The above paragraph about sums up the position, but of course, people taken their own  and argue the hind leg off a donkey, as we used to say, to preserve their viewpoint. I haven't decided on my stance yet, but it is always good to know the parameters of an argument. In the Viking  books I've written so far - Far After Gold, Viking Summer and Magician's Bride  and of course Alba is Mine,I haven't really had to make a decision, but I have a niggling feeling I might have to this time. 

Do you talk like a character in a book?

Blossom is early in 2019

This interview with Phillippa Gregory interested me. She's talking about language in her books:

"In terms of styles of language‚ I deliberately took the choice to use fundamentally modern language‚ but quite pure and quite simple. So I don′t use slang and I don′t use modern idioms. This is to make it acceptable to a wider audience and to write as well as I possibly can without being limited by language. 

For example‚ if I was to write a novel set in France and there were French people speaking French to each other − I wouldn′t put that on the page in French‚ I′d put it in English − and the reader understands as it′s part of a convention of reading a novel‚ that when someone is speaking Russian or French you don′t get a page of Russian or French − you get it in English.

If someone said to me that the past is a foreign country‚ it seems to me that it speaks a foreign language. So in terms of any notion of thee and thus and thy‚ superfluous words‚ I tend not to use them as it′s so strange to the modern eye. You also gain nothing by using them and the chances of rendering them correctly are very slim.

In the case of early modern society we don′t know how they spoke‚ we know how people have written down Shakespeare plays‚ but we don′t know how people actually spoke or what they sounded like. We do believe however that Anne Boleyn maintained the French accent throughout her life as she believed that it made her a bit special‚ I mention this in the novel. But in terms of how actually people spoke‚ we don′t know‚ so I won′t even make a guess."

Some authors do attempt language as they thought it was spoken. Patricia Finney is one of them. I once tried her book  Firedrake's Eye, but didn't get very far with it. More of a struggle than a pleasure in my view, but of course, others love it. She "endows her players with a rich language--essentially modern English lightly laced with fanciful syntax and Elizabethan vocabulary."

On Nov 26, 2003 Roz Kaveney wrote in the Telegraph : "The books' language is a triumph. Finney finds a workable compromise between anachronistic slanginess and a verbose rhodomontade that would probably more accurately represent much of Elizabethan speech."

Now rhodomontade is not in my trusty dictionary, but rhodo means rose coloured. However, the internet tells me it means "pretentiously boastful or bragging." Still, it doesn't tempt me to go find the book and read it. Would you?

Language, please!

There is a lot of fun to be had reading websites and when I followed the link to this one I must admit I chuckled. So much so that I thought I might show some of it here. It isn't a new post and there are lots of comments which are informative too. In six years a lot may have changed with regards to some of the words , but it never hurts to keep checking.... 

Oh, hell, since I’m being nitpicky and bitchy already…

by Candy · Dec 21, 2010 at 12:22 am · Comments Off

(Prefatory note: Again, apologies to Dear Author for stealing their style. I guess I’m in a epistolary mood these days.)

Dear various American authors of historical romances who are trying very, very hard to sound authentically British,

It’s not like I’m the foremost Britpicker of all time. Not even close. But I’ve noticed a distressing trend among your ranks in recent days. I understand that you are probably sick of readers bitching and moaning about how American authors sound too contemporary and too American, so you’ve decided to inject some authentic Britishisms to spruce up the joint. I applaud your efforts. However, allow me to offer the following vocabulary tips:

1. Your Regency- or Victorian-era English aristocrat isn’t going to use the word “git” as a term that means “jackass” or “fuckwit.” Why? Well, partly because it’s a term more closely associated with the working classes, and the class cultures weren’t quite as permeable as they tend to be today. Partly because the etymological roots for “git” are probably Scottish. And lastly, and probably most importantly, because it didn’t become common usage until the 20th century.

There's much more and all the comments to read. Just follow the link: here

Things were different then

How have I missed Dr Ian Mortimer? I've only just discoverd he writes fiction as James Forrester, and yes, I've read them. Duh. Now I am deep into the Time Traveller's Guide ot Medieval England, and enjoying all the detail. He claims that medieval man  had no understanding of cultural development which is why the paintings on the fourteenth century church walls depict Christ and his disciples in medieval clothes.

He says, and I believe him, that almost everything about the fourteenth century is different from the modern world.  Consider the aristocracy of England, who have been speaking French since the Norman invasion in 1066. By the fourteenth century, they are only just switching to English. Edward III speaks English, books start to be written in English even though Latin is still the preferred language of law. English slowly becomes the tongue of the country even though old knights and ladies cannot be bothered to learn a new language "at their age." Cornwall persists in speaking Cornish, and Wales in Welsh. If dialects present problems today, they were so much stronger more prevalent and more difficult in medieval days.

Knowing the date is such an easy thing today. But medieval English people considered Lady Day, 25th March, as the start of a new year. Some aristocrats prefer 1st January, and clerks of the Exchequer begin their new year on Michaelmas Day, 29th September.
All three systems were in use at the same time, and things are furthe complicated when you know that Florence and Venice work a year behind England. Portugal and Castile operate a different calendar altogether and sailing into Lisbon would have taken you into a future 39 years ahead of England. Nobody uses the term Anno Domini, either. They use the regnal year, ie I am writing this in the sixty first year of Elizabeth II.

Other things are different, too. Work and working condition, for a start. Then there's money, and dress and education....

PS We have frogspawn - and the little pond is frozen!

Oxford commas

It was my local authors' lunch yesterday, hence my dereliction of duty regarding a new blog post. After a lovely lunch and much general chatter, we got down to talking about writing. The Oxford comma became a topic. Now I was interested in this because having done edits with more than one US indie publisher, I've noticed how much more frequent is their use of a comma.

I'm not denying commas are important. As Truss says in her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a humble comma can change the sense of a sentence. Take for example:
"Verily, I say unto thee, this day thou shalt be with me in Paradise" and compare it to "Verily I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise." See how the meaning changes?

The Oxford comma is the one that comes after white in the sentence "The boat is red, white, and blue." In the UK, the standard usage is to omit it. In America, standard usage is to put it in.

Since the comma is one of those markers in language that indicates where the reader

ice fowers

should slow down and pause in order to fully appreciate what is being said, then sometimes the extra comma is useful and sometimes it is not. My own feeling is that quite often one's reaction is no more than noticing something different, something unusual. Americans notice the comma is missing, in the UK we notice there's an extra comma where we wouldn't expect one. Does it destroy the reading enjoyment of the story? Not really. Not for more than half second, anyway.

What I do find confusing is when to use commas joining two complete sentences. When I'm edited in the US, they take out the ones I use, and put in ones I wouldn't, and I can't always see why. In the UK, commas are used with conjunctions such as and, or, but, while and yet. But we never do it with however and nevertheless.

Just to make life even more confusing, there's something called the splice comma.  When the conjunction is omitted and the comma is retained, when it should really be a semi-colon - that's a splice comma. Example: Pansy woke up in an unfamiliar bed, she felt odd. Famous writers like Updike, Beckett, E.M.Forster and Somerset Maugham use it, and get away with it. Used by them, it is considered dashing, poetic and effective, says Truss. Done by those who don't understand the rule, it is awful.

All I can add is that I get very confused when the grammar I learned at school and have used all my life is deemed to be incorrect. I sit here and muse how very different the novels of Nora Roberts would be if her books were put into UK English before they were loosed on the British public. Watch caps and Oreoes? What the hell are they?

Historical language and its uses

"Amazon, which commands 5 to 15 percent of the book market, claims that for titles with Kindle versions, digital sales represent about 35 percent of total sales."

This interesting snippet comes from a longer article here. It seems a best-selling American thriller writer has lost fans because Amazon priced his latest book too highly and they are refusing to buy.

I read an interesting blog today in which Anne Gilbert- link - discusses what some call "gadzooks" language, or "writing forsoothly". Ms Gilbert calls it "fake poetic," a kind of artificial "archaic" supposed to suggest an "olde-tymey" type of speech.

She uses "upon"(rather than just plain "on"), "ere", "nay", "mayhap" as examples and claims a lot of writers of historical romance think they are conveying "olde-tymey" speech patterns.

The style is closer to Shakespeare's time than early medieval English. She thinks some historical fiction writers in Victorian times used this kind of language and that the "tradition" has never entirely died out. I think she's right on both counts.

She goes on to say that some readers of historical fiction enjoy this kind of fake "archaism" because they think it gives them a flavour of the way language was spoken then.

Since she is thinking of Sharon Penman's writing, she goes on to wonder about Penman's use of "Britishisms," and because Penman is an American writer, living in New Jersey, she wonders why she spells words in the British way - "whilst" or "amongst", rather than "while" or "among" in the American way. She wonders why American writers do this.

I applaud Penman for spelling the British way when the story and characters are set in Britain. There is nothing that makes me grind my teeth more than reading a story set in this country and having so-called English characters who talk like modern Americans. It happens in narrative passages as well. Suddenly a glaring spelling error leaps off the page and I think crappy writing, crappy editing and then realise - American author, American spelling.

If I read a modern American story - and I do - Gerritsen and Roberts come to mind readily enough - then I want the characters's dialogue and the narrative writing to be US English. But I wonder if American audiences want a UK story set in Regency Yorkshire to have characters who speak like Americans? And if so, why? How can this be less of an issue than using "mayhap" and "gadzooks"?

Reeth and language

Last picture of Reeth.

I don't know if this is of interest to anyone but me, but I've been "thinking aloud" recently about language in historical novels, and quoting one or two authors views as well as giving my own. Lindsey Davis is eloquent on the topic. As she says, we can be pretty sure that people in 1st-century Rome didn't speak like one of Cicero's speeches when they were talking to their friends/arguing with their landlords/chatting up a girl, and ditto people in Anglo-Saxon England didn't talk as if they were declaiming Beowulf, or Norsemen as if they were reciting a saga.

Slang and colloquialisms tend not to be used in the formal records posterity has handed down to us, just as they are not used in formal written records today - but that doesn't mean they didn't exist, and some authors think colloquial modern English gives a much better 'feel' for the people and their world than the stilted dialogue you sometimes see in historical fiction.
I've just been reading a couple of paranormal romances that would have us believe half the clans of Scotland turn into a wolf or a hunting cat at the full moon and while I was prepared to go along with that for a while (They are sold as paranormal romances, after all) what really put me off is the linguistic style - "doesnae, cannae, willnae" in almost every sentence of dialogue. I do wonder how the authors see/hear these words being pronounced in their heads - and I wonder if they pronounce them differently to me!

Anyone got any thoughts, views, opinions on this? I'd love to hear!

And finally....

I found an interview with Phillippa Gregory in which she states:

"In terms of styles of language‚ I deliberately took the choice to use fundamentally modern language‚ but quite pure and quite simple. So I don′t use slang and I don′t use modern idioms. This is to make it acceptable to a wider audience and to write as well as I possibly can without being limited by language. For example‚ if I was to write a novel set in France and there were French people speaking French to each other − I wouldn′t put that on the page in French‚ I′d put it in English − and the reader understands as it′s part of a convention of reading a novel‚ that when someone is speaking Russian or French you don′t get a page of Russian or French − you get it in English.
If someone said to me that the past is a foreign country‚ it seems to me that it speaks a foreign language. So in terms of any notion of thee and thus and thy‚ superfluous words‚ I tend not to use them as it′s so strange to the modern eye. You also gain nothing by using them and the chances of rendering them correctly are very slim.
In the case of early modern society we don′t know how they spoke‚ we know how people have written down Shakespeare plays‚ but we don′t know how people actually spoke or what they sounded like. We do believe however that Anne Boleyn maintained the French accent throughout her life as she believed that it made her a bit special‚ I mention this in the novel. But in terms of how actually people spoke‚ we don′t know‚ so I won′t even make a guess."

An author who thinks differently is Patricia Finney. I once tried her book Firedrake's Eye but didn't get very far with it as I found reading it was rather more of a struggle than a pleasure. A review of her book A Shadow of Gulls says she "endows her players with a rich language--essentially modern English lightly laced with fanciful syntax and Elizabethan vocabulary."
On Nov 26, 2003 Roz Kaveney wrote in the Telegraph : "The books' language is a triumph. Finney finds a workable compromise between anachronistic slanginess and a verbose rhodomontade that would probably more accurately represent much of Elizabethan speech."

Now rhodomontade is not in my trusty dictionary, but rhodo means rose coloured. However, the internet tells me it means "pretentiously boastful or bragging." Still, it doesn't tempt me to go find the book and read it. Would you?

More thoughts on language styles

"I know that some readers don’t like my ‘modern language’ approach – and, I mean, really don’t like it! Well, I can understand that; I do sympathise with that. I understand that, for some readers, the modern language ‘gets in the way’, breaks the spell, even seems ridiculous. But that’s how the stilted dialogue of many other historical novels seems to me. I wanted to write a ‘historical novel’ that I’d want to read. When I’d finished The Queen of Subtleties, my agent and editor each compiled a list of words that had jarred, for them: words that had gone too far. I did study those lists (and was grateful for their efforts!), but in the end I decided to ignore them. Because, otherwise, I’d be writing by committee. I’d had a vision for the book, and I had to stay true to that. And you can’t please all the people, all the time."
This is a snippet from Suzannah Dunn's website, and it is well worth reading the whole piece.

I read the Sixth Wife, and to be honest I was put off by the modern language the author used, not only for her dialogue but I think I'm correct in saying she used it for exposition too. But you know, by the middle of the book I was easier with it and by the end I'd forgotten about it. My mindset had altered and embraced her use of language.

I know that Dorothy Dunnett wrote in what I have to call "modern language." I had no problems with her novels because she did not use modern jargon or slang - nothing too twentieth century. If I checked I'd probably find there were no words in her Lymond series that would have been unfamiliar in 1560. (Though occasionally there was a tiny slip - I'm not convinced that even the brightest person alive then would have know of the existence of brain cells.) In her first book Ms Dunnett made a glorious game out of using "old" words like passementerie - and I hope I've spelled that correctly - I don't use it very often! - that sent many of us off on a chase through dictionaries to discover the meaning. I enjoyed that, but some people found it irritating.

Ms Dunnett had a style all her own, and one I enjoyed tremendously. The opening line of Disorderly Knights, for instance: "On the day his grannie was killed by the English, Sir William Scott the Younger of Buccleuch was at Melrose Abbey, marrying his aunt." Now doesn't that get your attention? It got mine.

Or, a little later in the chapter - "Swearing with great spirit from time to time, always a good sign with Sir Walter, he flew through the filmy splendours of autumn, primed to nick Kerr heads like old semmit buttons."

You don't need to know what old semmit buttons are to pick up sense of glorious adventure and tongue in cheek humour to know you're going to enjoy a wonderful read.

Saturnalia

Here's an autumn picture - newly ploughed fields....and Halloween went by without a murmur in our cul de sac. Put it down to the nasty cold rain that night, or the fact that the kids have all grown beyond wearing mum's old sheet with two holes cut for eyes. Yet in town, adults were standing in a ten, twelve yard queue, outside in the cold, waiting to get inside and make purchases of some kind at the only Halloween shop in town. It seems to me a very odd thing when adults take over festivals that twenty years ago were considered fit only for children.

I finished reading Saturnalia by Lindsey Davis last week and thought I'd offer a comment or two. I was particularly intrigued by her use of language. I knew she used modern langauge, but now that I'm writing myself I looked at what she does with new eyes. Isn't it amazing how this happens? Something I've taken for granted for years suddenly takes on a new aspect because I started to question how I used language in my writing.

Lindsey says in the notes section: "I write about another culture, where people spoke another language, one which has mainly survived either in a literary form or as tavern wall graffiti. Many an argot must have existed in between. People sometimes discuss whether the Romans would really sound as I portray them - forgetting firstly that the Romans spoke Latin not English, and that on the streets and in the provinces they must have spoekn versions of Latin that did not survive. I have to find my own ways to make narrative and dialogue convincing."

She goes on: "It is no good hoping that the carbonised papyri from Herculaneum that are now being so painstakingly unravelled by scholars will produce clues; so far they are all Greek to me, and indeed to everyone. If Calpurnius Piso, thought to be the villa's owner, owned a Slang Thesaurus, we have not found it."

So she deploys metaphors and similes that work in context, and sometimes she invents words, although she has to struggle to get them by her British editor. And above all, she uses modern, slang English. It works. And people like it; after all, this is her eighteenth book about Marcus Didius Falco.

Frozen shoulder

Paid my first visit to a physiotherapist yesterday and had a secondary frozen shoulder diagnosed and manipulated. Intriguing experience. I had great expectations of ultrasound, but couldn't feel a thing!

Since my great flurry of activity on selling earlier in the month, I have received a few negative replies. Caroline Sheldon, A P Watt, Rupert Heath and Gregory & Co have turned down Warden's Bride, and Little Black Dress felt the Rimrock Caper wasn't for them. M&B don't want Herondale's Chance, either.

I think my skin's growing thicker, because I sighed and sent them out again into the big cold world. Somebody, somewhere is going to like them. It'll just take time. I didn't have much faith in agents responding favourably, I have to say. They seem to be flooded out with people (like me!) who think they can write and expect to be published. I blame computers. I've said this before and no doubt I'll say it again, but I do think a PC turns out such an impressive looking piece of work that the author thinks the content is as good as the appearance. Often, it isn't.

I'm "reading the line," as publishers so often tell aspiring authors, so now I'm writing as a reader rather than an aspiring writer. Still with me? Good. The book is one of this year's (or maybe 2007) M&B historicals, by an American author. I find it curious that this author has done so much research into the Victorian period, specified on the first page as 1889, and then drops into language that uses gotten and off of in the same sentence, has her characters eat biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Not only that, M&B have published it as a Regency.

I cannot imagine eating biscuits (sweet, sugary) and gravy (rich and meaty) for breakfast. And 1889 is well into the Victorian era, forty years away from the Regency. Where, oh where was the
editor when this was going through the processes? The story is good, the writing vibrant but these little things, so easily corrected, stand out like giant rocks in a river and jerk me out of the story. I hereby send up a plea to all editors - please, ensure the books are written in whichever language is correct to the time and place of the story. American English and British English are two very distinct languages, I fear!