Spunk & Bite Page 11
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DOWNSIDING INTO JARGON
While shifting is an inventive and often overlooked way to achieve novelty, it also has its downsides. Novelty too often takes the place of elegant vocabulary; and of course not all novelty scores a hit—some of it positively gags discerning readers. Writers inventing or trying out new usages have to weigh their attention- getting value against their turn-off potential.
That negative potential is rarely greater than in the business world, a breeding ground for enallage-spawned jargon. In the ad slogan “We help you to office. To office better,” the new verb office seems right out of a Dilbert cartoon—as does the verb resource in the slogan “Resource what you like, the way you like, with Novell Directory Services.”
The verb repurpose (as in repurposing the organization) is the product of yet another shift that offends sensitive eardrums these days—and never mind that it was Shakespeare who originally shifted purpose into a verb. (In the Elizabethan era, functional shifts gushed forth like hot springs.) The Bard used proverb and many other nouns as verbs, and still packed ’em in at the Globe.
Abrasiveness aside, the proliferation of enallage-based jargon is in keeping with the natural evolution of language. As usual, the question for writers is one of audience. Business people tire of their vogue words; they can only “partner” and “right-size” so long without hungering for aggressive new verbs, including former nouns. If you write for these people, go ahead and purpose your rhetoric to them.
And speaking of the business world, here’s a classic case of enallage: When a credit agency identifies a deadbeat debtor, the non-payer is referred to not merely as a “bad risk” or “bad person,” but as a “bad.” Shifting the adjective bad into a noun is like saying, “once a bad, always a bad, and bad through and through.” And before long, without the grip, scratch, or flow (all shifted verbs referring to money) to pay up, that bad could end up a certified crazy.
SIXTEEN
INTENSIFIERS FOR THE FEEBLE
Intensity—oh, to achieve it! To intensify one’s writing, to punch it up, make it engaging, drive it home. To wield words like axes “for the frozen sea inside us,” as Franz-the-Man Kafka intensely phrased it.
All along we’ve been talking about intensity in one guise or another. And always, the enemy has been the tendency of words to grow feeble with overuse. But now we come to a rhetorical device whose name should give hope to every dull, worn, weak, and cowardly locution:
The intensifier.
Intensifiers are modifying adverbs meant to amplify the qualities of other modifiers (and sometimes the action of verbs). If something is good, then awfully attempts to boost—intensify—that quality to awfully good; similarly, “so small”; “very exotic”; “really flew.” You’d think intensifiers would be just perfect for writers. But what do we hear from modern authorities? “Stay away from the things.”
Here’s the problem: Writers are expected to come up with vocabulary that packs its own intensity—with words like fractious (very irritable) and gravid (pretty pregnant). Otherwise, writers might as well be any bozo, intensifying feeble words with monotonous profanities—every freaking other freaking word—or with the stock intensifiers typical of everyday conversations (especially mobile-phone conversations): very, really, so, extremely, all, definitely, actually, seriously, pretty, wholly, quite, totally, absolutely, and so on.
Such intensifiers are supposed to jack up the ordinary adjectives and adverbs that everyone has handy—nice, great, fast, cute, incredible, etc. Thus do we intensify “nice” in, “Have an extremely nice day.” But because everyone uses them all the time, the intensifiers themselves can become as dead as the dead weight they’re trying to animate. Even seventeenth-century intensifiers that seem colorful to us today—as in “clean starved,” “passing strange,” “shredly vexed,” or “i’sooth”—went the way of all overused words, notes The Cambridge History of English and American Literature; they were replaced by less punchy (and, it seems, successively more anemic) eighteenth-century forms such as vastly and prodigiously.
When intensifiers lack force, they are sometimes propped up by italics—“she was very important, very rich”—or, in speech, by volume and theatrical pauses: “She was a [pause] WONDERFULLY [pause] special person.” But when used repeatedly, such props become so weak that they de-intensify; they become gnat-like and annoying. As suggested in Chapter 6, wonderfully and other -ly adverbs too worn to intensify effectively are best used in sarcastic figures of speech such as paradoxes and oxymorons: She was wonderfully dismal.
So again, writers are advised to learn words whose meanings incorporate the sense of very or really and the like. This is good advice; writers must build forceful vocabularies. But how rigorously should one replace stock intensifiers with these power words? Should one annihilate all common intensifiers, or strike some sort of balance?
INTENSIFIERS IN THE BLOOD
In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White considered such intensifiers as very and pretty to be “the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.” Avoid their use, they ruled.
I would say avoid unrelenting use, but do not throw out the pond water with the leeches. Well, maybe I wouldn’t say that. I would say this: Intensifiers run in the blood of natural speech; they might be seen, if not as red cells, then as the leukocytes that help defend against fancy-schmancy invaders. Sometimes replacing stock intensifiers with erudite vocabulary can sound labored or arcane—too writerly. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,” Elmore Leonard once advised. You may not want to lose the honesty and gestural quality of ordinary speech. So instead of writing She sensed something very bad—very bad, indeed, should you write, She sensed something execrable? In most contexts, probably not. Save power vocabulary for when its distinctive force is needed—which will be often enough—or for when a narrator’s voice demands it. Streams of high-performance words can burden the reader, clot the flow.
Stock intensifiers are so much a part of the English idiom that our prose feels uncomfortable without them. They may do little intensifying, as the rhetoricians say, yet they are part of the background rhythms of our language, the anticipated beats of narration. Speakers often deliver them with musical inflection—“He’s REALLY hot”—which is welcome relief amidst the monotone of average American speech.
To some degree, an intensifier acts as a signal: it announces that the word following it is worn out, and that it should be understood as inadequate. For example, in the phrase an utterly beautiful night, the author is saying, “Look, I mean something beyond beautiful, even if I don’t have the precise word; try to imagine it.” We’ve been sending such messages forever—straining like shot-putters for some extra distance, because most words are inadequate, and power-packed modifiers do not leap to the average tongue.
A 2004 research study1 suggests the extent to which intensifiers are embedded in colloquial speech. Researchers counted 1,886 uses of intensifiers in eight years’ worth of episodes of the sitcom Friends. Leading the pack was so, accounting for 45 percent of the total uses, followed by really (25 percent) and very (15 percent). (These findings paralleled those of an earlier study of speakers in northeastern England. In that study, the overall rate of intensification was the same, as were the three most-used intensifiers, though they were used with differing frequency: very was the most common, followed by really and so.) The 2004 study also posited that it was female speakers who initiated the rise of so as the great American intensifier (see sidebar, “The So-Special Case of so,” below).
Just because intensifiers course through informal speech, must we also use them in journalism and literature? Not necessarily—but we certainly can use them in situations where they feel natural, or communicate a particular tone. At the very least, we should not hamstring our writing styles trying to replace each intensifier with a more powerful locution.
Scan any respectable publication and you’ll find intensifiers that no editor saw fit to slash,
albeit some of them in quoted remarks. (“It’s very amazing,” said Boston Red Sox manager Terry Francona of the team’s epic 2004 season.) In the space of just two weeks, as I was writing this chapter, 576 reallys and 243 actuallys appeared in the Washington Post. And in literature? Shakespeare applied very and truly to legions of modifiers. Or take a novel like Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Not only is it staggeringly good, but its much-praised “full-throttle” style embraces stock intensifiers throughout, as in “an extremely happening walk,” “you were so not dressed fine,” “nothing really is all that real anymore,” and “This is bad. This is so bad. This is unbelievably bad. This is so unbelievably bad.”
Even in poetry, where stock anything is usually fatal, the colloquial qualities of intensifiers can be woven into themes—though the weaving is best left to such masters of the conversational voice as Billy Collins. In his “Workshop,” for example—a poem that critiques itself, poetry-workshop-style—he describes his poet’s voice as “very casual, very blue jeans.”
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THE SO-SPECIAL CASE OF SO
The easily uttered so is a venerable English word; swa, an early form of it, predates Beowulf. Few of so’s thirty-odd contemporary meanings present usage problems. But so the intensifier, in spite of at least 1,600 years’ use, has a way of associating itself with annoying speech habits and winding up on people’s hit lists.
E. B. White was among those who targeted the usage for extinction. “Avoid, in writing,” he decreed in The Elements of Style, “the use of so as an intensifier: ‘so good’; ‘so warm’; ‘so delightful.’ ” Never mind that White used it in his own writings—for example, in his lovely essay, “Once More to the Lake,” in which he describes a school of minnows “so clear and sharp in the sunlight.”
In the 1970s, not long after White issued his decree, editor Harry G. Nickels also attacked the wee intensifier, targeting what he called “the effect of girlish gushing” created by a stressed so. He urged “the agents of Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation” to cure themselves of the habit of using such expressions as “Her dress was so skimpy.”
But so, the little intensifier that could, keeps chugging along, finding its way into our language. Such recommended intensifiers as indeed or extremely stand little chance against the well-oiled, sibilant so. In fact, so’s reach now extends far beyond the modification of mere adverbs and adjectives; it has become an intensifier of nouns, noun phrases, and just about any part of speech imaginable: so now; so President Bush; so last year; so dot-com; so “I’m-in-charge-here-and-what-I-say-goes.”
Ever-intense young language users have stretched the so envelope to create a potent negative intensifier: “You are so not my parents anymore!” But although this locution has embedded itself in our vernaculars, it remains so not standard English.
Use of the intensive so itself, however, can be judged case by case. After an audience with Pope John Paul II, a New York psychiatrist remarked that His Holiness “is so single-mindedly focused.” Was this not intensifying an intensifier of His Intensity? Maybe. But, hey—for this subject, there are dispensations.
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WHEN NOT TO USE INTENSIFIERS
Unless excessive, then, intensifiers usually do no harm, and even have their places—they “ease a phrase now and then,” as writing mentor Sheridan Baker allowed. But there are instances when avoiding them is the prudent choice. Most irritating are intensifiers that, instead of boosting the effects of other words, call negative attention to themselves. They do so when they are
• fading out of vogue (mondo, mega, majorly, hella, fer sure);
• absurdly redundant (extremely unique, very sublime, completely perfect);
• epidemic, especially among teens (totally, basically, incredibly, amazingly, unbelievably);
• repeated and stacked (really, really, actually sincere);
• clichéd (deeply disturbing; basically sound); or
• shoehorned from vernacular into formal usage (Real Simple magazine).
Fussy language users (including fussy fictional characters) might also refrain from pairing very with verb-based words, unless the pairings are already idiomatic. Thus, the idiomatic very depressed is all right, but the rarer very decimated should be refined to very much decimated. And if I had to explain why, I’d be very much discomfited.
Then again, if you want to get playful in some frisky context, dare to use very to intensify a verb: She was very hungry and, dude, she very ate.” You will have intensified a verb big-time, and so what if some grammarian quite loses his lunch?
SEVENTEEN
OPENING WORDS: THE GLORIOUS PORTAL
I promise that something will stimulate you if you continue reading.
Do your opening sentences make that promise? Do they vow to scratch the reader’s eternal itch for sensation? How else to keep readers from the suck of wall-sized entertainment monitors? How else to compete with the legions of adept, promise-making writers?
One hears the terms hook and benefit in connection with openings; but stimulation—perhaps another way of saying “bite”—is what wins the day. To say you will stimulate today’s already-bombarded readers seems a cocky promise; but most of what bombards them is numbingly generic. Compelling words, on the other hand, still have the power to seize the reader’s imagination, which is always eager to follow hints and implications down the rabbit hole into new realms of feeling.
Fiction, by its very nature, promises to transport readers to imaginative realms. Good openings are a bonus, but less critical than what develops after them. Even the frenetic reader acknowledges, with a twitch, that it may take some time for fictional landscapes to materialize. It is nonfiction that needs the glorious portal: a gateway that declares, “something will stimulate you if you continue reading.”
It may seem odd that people have to be induced to read truth, which is what nonfiction purports to be. But truth carries no inherent promises of stimulation—not even truth presented as art. (“In art, truth that is boring is not art,” said writer Isaac Bashevis Singer.) Some of the most stupefying content in the cosmos can be classified as truth, as can some of the most soul-stirring. “I promise that my truth will stir the pants off your soul,” is the message readers of nonfiction want to hear from you—and they want to hear it within the first few sentences.
Truth has another problem: People feel they have heard most of it, five times over. “Tell me something I don’t know,” says the reader. “Or tell me something I know in a way that stimulates me—starting now!”
Oh, what cruel burdens for an opening paragraph or two! No wonder some writers feel they have to load every hooking device, pyrotechnical locution, and winking charm into their openings. You know the style:
There are worse spots to wait for Bill Murray than the Vince Lombardi Rest Area on the New Jersey Turnpike. Sure, the place smells like p—s, and feels like a peep-show booth, but it’s got the Jersey-rest-stop grand slam: A TCBY, a Nathan’s Famous, a Burger King, and a Cinnabon. (—Scott Raab, Esquire)
A promise of gonzo-type stimulation to be sure; but one more element and it might overflow, sort of like a rest stop trash barrel.
WHAT’S IN A PROMISE
An opening might promise shock, surprise, inspiration, or amusement; or self-improvement and other transformations; or aesthetic pleasure, material gain, enlightenment, titillation, fright, even sorrow. Anything that makes the juices flow.
Promises can be explicit: Young Angela’s story of pain and courage will touch every heart. The implicit approach is generally more effective, however. As they say in the writing game, let the reader make the connection between stimulus and sensation: Angela, age 11, has never left her room.
The openings we will cite here are from various eras and types of nonfiction. Not only have they stood the test of time, but they also demonstrate the virtues of today’s best beginnings: As promises, they are uncomplicated, convincing, and true to what’s de
livered; and as creative writing, they employ such elements of style as:
• Symbolism: small details suggesting grand meanings
• Understatement: less implying more
• Contrast: tension between two or more elements
• Foreboding: hints of trouble ahead
• Force: sensual imagery, powerful verbs
• Intimacy: establishment of a connection between narrator and reader
Anne Frank opened her diary with the words, “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone.” For Anne’s story, that simple promise, styled with intimacy, is an opening that defies improvement.
WRITING THE OPENING: HOW SOON, HOW MUCH
How writers get going on openings may depend on their personalities. Some authors have to fashion a polished opening before they begin the rest of the story. Their opening sets a tone and direction. It inspires them to live up to a beautifully articulated promise. It is money in the bank. And it is compulsive, because such writers know they will only pick at the opening later, maybe rewrite it entirely. Other authors, perhaps more rational, slap down any opening to get the story rolling, then come back to craft it according to what follows. They might find that a buried anecdote, even their punchy conclusion, contains the nugget of the ideal opening. Either approach can work, but the compulsive types suffer the usual anguish.