Do You Have What It Takes to be a Cheese Whiz? Archaic Words

By Kathleen Kaska 

When I worked at Cave Art Press, a small publishing company in Anacortes, one of my tasks was to write the weekly blog posts. It had to address writing styles, grammar and punctuation rules, and the down and dirty of publishing and marketing—and it had to be funny. These blog posts eventually became a tongue-in-cheek book entitled, "Do You Have a Catharsis Handy? Five Minute-Writer Tips." Here's one about archaic words and my own take on them.

Thanks to Google, I stumble upon many of my Writing Tips topics by accident. Here are some archaic (did they ever really exist?) but entertaining words and phrases that I discovered while I was researching other topics, along with some neologisms of my own:

With Squirrel: If you were a woman who lived in the Ozarks many moons ago and you found yourself “with squirrel,” then you were expecting a child. (Vance Randolph’s Down in the Holler: A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech, 1953). I would call such a woman Squirrely.

Lunting: I suspect that Sherlock Holmes was into lunting—i.e., walking while smoking a pipe. (John Mactaggart’s Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, 1824). I would call people who do this lunters.

The following are from The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten, by Jeffrey Kacirk:

Spermologer: It doesn’t mean what you think. A spermologer is a columnist! Three of my favorites are Father Ron Rolheiser; Austin native, John Kelso; and funny-lady, Lisa Scottoline. In my world I’d refer to them as wittyosophers.

Queerplungers: An English term for a scam in which an individual jumped into water, was “rescued” by accomplices, and was subsequently taken in by rehab houses that cared for people who tried to commit suicide. In the benevolent society of the time, the rescuers were rewarded with a guinea each, while the person who “attempted suicide” was sent away with a monetary donation to make his life less depressing. Maybe a better word for these folks would be Scam Dunkers. 

Finally, my favorite:

Tyromancy: If you can’t find a crystal ball, use cheese! One of my Cave Art Press colleagues thought tyromancy sounds like “a Jurassic love story.” In fact, it is the act of predicting birth, love, and death by reading the appearance of a piece of cheese. It is also the act of using cheese to answer questions: the most obvious answers to a question are written on pieces of cheese (one answer per piece). The pieces of cheese are fed to a rat. Whichever piece is eaten first is the answer to the question.

I suspect a person who engaged in this method of prediction and became notable would have been called a tyromaniac. I would call him a cheez-whiz. 

This is my last post as a member of the Stiletto Gang, but I will stay in touch and follow you wonderfully, creative authors. 

Best always,

Kathleen

Kathleen is a Texas gal. Except for an eighteen-month hiatus living in New York City after college, she continuously lived in the Lone Star State for fifty years. Since then, Texas has been hit and miss—a little hit, but a hell of a lot of miss. There was a time when she thought she would happily die in Austin, Texas. But circumstances and weather—especially weather—changed that. Now she spends most of the year on Fidalgo Island in Washington State with a view of the bay and the mountains. When she gets homesick, she and her husband plug in the iPhone to Willie—as in Nelson. Soon they are dancing the two-step, imagining they are at our favorite honky-tonk in Tokio, Texas, where the mayor is believed to be a dog. Who wouldn't miss that?

Kathleen writes mysteries. She blogs about writing, publishing, marketing, animal rights, birding, and quirky things that come to mind. Go to her website: Kathleen Kaska and check out her latest blog series, "Growing Up Catholic in a Small Texas Town."

 

 

What’s Happening to the English Language?

by Saralyn Richard

I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. My parents encouraged me to be an English teacher, instead. So, I spent several decades reading and grading other people’s writing. I even taught journalism and creative writing—to teenagers and later to seniors (aged 50+). Although teaching kept me way too busy to write, it also kept me in the universe of writers and writing. I was like a frustrated chef who had all the best recipes and ingredients but couldn’t enter the kitchen.

            Several years ago, I came to a crossroads in my education career. By then I’d moved into administration and school improvement consulting, and the constant travel had become too much. I stepped back from on-site consulting and began doing what I’d always loved, writing. In this case, it was technical writing—curricula, white papers, articles, proposals, and grants.

            It was a joy to flex my writing muscles. I had a blast selecting the best words, sentence structures, and arguments. The rules of grammar and mechanics rolled back into my frontal lobe as if they had never left.

                                            Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com

            Soon I was ready to try my hand at fiction, and I took great delight in practicing other tools of the trade, such as imagery, figures of speech, and dialogue. Grateful for a traditional education in grammar and composition, which even included diagramming sentences, I forged ahead with fulfilling my dream deferred.

            What I didn’t realize is how much the English language had relaxed while I was busy doing classroom duty. When had the Oxford comma controversy reared its ugly head? When had use of “their” as a singular possessive pronoun come into acceptable use? How had adverbs, those lovely -ly descriptors, become persona non grata? I began seeing non-words like “supposably” and “irregardless” cropping up in articles that had supposedly been edited and vetted for publication. And when did “blonde” become an adjective?

            Fortunately, my first publisher was as picky as I was, and the few times we clashed over how to punctuate something, we let the Chicago Manual of Style serve as referee, and most of the time, Chicago sided with me. I did go to the mat a few times over such things as where the apostrophe should go in a possessive of a proper name ending in “s.”

                                            Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com

            If I sound like a hundred-year-old spinster schoolteacher, let me assure you that is not the case. I can waltz and fox trot, but I can also hit the whoah. I’m sure everyone reading this post has certain pet peeves regarding the English language. What are yours?

 

Saralyn Richard is the author of A MURDER OF PRINCIPAL, the Detective Parrott mystery series, and the children’s book, NAUGHTY NANA. Follow her on social media and on her website here.

 

 

How do you write a mystery?

by Bethany Maines

As I approach the end of my third Carrie Mae Mystery manuscript (60,000 words and climbing!), I find myself more impressed now by a basic Nancy Drew, than I was when I was ten.  My characters are better than when I started writing.  My plotting is infinitely stronger. My grasp of grammar, may actually have gotten worse, but I do use less adverbs (and I actually know what they are), but it's this business of “mystery” that still perplexes me.  Clues? There should be some.  But how many? How obvious should be?  Is that too obvious? Too subtle? How many suspects are required? Is there a manual somewhere? I could really use a manual.

Partially, I’ve been avoiding this trouble by not writing standard mysteries.  I call them women’s action adventure because I think more mysteries could use a good car chase.  If you’ve seen Bullitt then you know that’s a movie that is holding onto its classic status simply on the strength of its car chase.  (It’s certainly not the strength of the jazz flute scene.)  But in April my first regular mystery, A Yearly Murder (working title), will be released and I find myself nervous that all the mystery aficionados will judge me. 

What if I didn’t put in enough clues?  What if the bad guy is too obvious?  What if I didn’t kill of Reginald creatively enough?  Serial killers and mystery writers – the only people who worry about being judged by their dead bodies. And I would worry about the psychological implications of that if I weren’t too busy worrying about whether or not I got my forensic research right. 

I hope that you’ll check out A Yearly Murder in April, and let me know if I got the clue quotient right!

Bethany Maines is the author of the Carrie Mae Mystery series and Tales from the City of Destiny. You can also view the Carrie Mae youtube video or catch up with her on Twitter and Facebook.

The Case for It's

By Bethany Maines

Recently, I was ranting on Facebook about my hatred for the periods in a.m. and p.m as well as the comma between city and state in addresses (see what you miss by not being my Facebook friend?) and one of my friends posted a link to Weird Al Yankovic’s new song "Word Crimes.”  As a long time Weird Al enthusiast and a Facebook friend to several editors and writers I had already seen the video (click here if you haven’t).  The video parodies “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke’s insanely catchy hit from 2013.  If you haven’t heard that one, then you probably weren’t living in America all of last year, but here you go – Blurred Lines.  (Warning: may not be suitable for work and my cause you to get in arguments with your feminist friends over whether or not the song is “rape-y”.  Double Warning: If you use the word rape-y at me, I will smite you.)  But back to the story, as I watched the Weird Al version again (because why wouldn’t you?) I was caught by the line “You do not use “it’s” in this case!”

But why don’t we?  Yes, yes, the current rules state that “it’s” is a contraction.  “It” is not possessive; “it” cannot own anything.  But I say, “Listen up English – if you’re not going to provide me with a gender neutral pronoun, why can’t I use the defacto pronoun already in use in conversation – it?”  Clearly, the language is lacking such a word. English should stop being stuffy and allow this clearly needed possessive to enter the dictionary.  I’d willingly delete "tweep” from the Oxford-English Dictionary if I could have “it’s.”  Who’s with me?

Bethany Maines is the author of the Carrie Mae Mystery series and Tales from the City of Destiny. You can also view the Carrie Mae video or catch up with her on Twitter and Facebook.