So, Your Humble Blogger is reading a book set in, oh, 1950 or so, in an alternate universe, English Country House Murder after WWII doesn’t happen, and the following comes up:
\n
Then here he came, tramping in police boots to disturb the hierarchies as they were laid down by bringing in an entirely orthogonal power.<\/blockquote>
\nAnd my immediate reaction was Orthoganal? Who the hell would have described the police and the aristocracy as orthagonal in 1950?<\/i> My second reaction was How the hell do you spell orthaganal anyway?<\/i> Then I went to a couple of dictionaries and found out that the use of that word in that manner seems to have come from computer programmer jargon, which, you know, not so much in 1950. Now, it’s possible<\/i> that a Scotland Yard Inspector who was interested in statistical mathematics and other branches of the higher philosophy would have independently invented the metaphorical use of the term, particularly in an alternate universe. I don’t mean to suggest that the author is flat-out wrong, here. Just that Your Humble Blogger was thrown out of the book by it. Possibly given another chance to look at it the author would defend the word, and possibly they would conclude that it could be more perfect. It isn’t a big deal, either way, except for the delicacy of the window through which we look at the book.
\nUm, that is, in books such as I take this one to be, where we are supposed to fall in to the story, rather than stand back and look at the window. There are different levels of transparency that writers aim for and readers achieve; it would be silly to discuss Finnegan’s Wake<\/i> in terms of the author getting in the way of the story. But I don’t think that applies here, and I’m going to continue not telling you the title and author, out of a misguided sense of fairness, so you’ll have to take my word for it, or do your own damn research, Pomeranz.
\nWhere was I? Oh, the clunker in the sentence. I am no writer of prose fiction. I’ve written a bit of dialogue, trying to make voices consistent, individuated, appropriate, interesting and beautiful (or ugly, depending), and I find it very difficult indeed. And I’ve spent five years or so creating the Voice of Vardibidian, the which I’ve managed to throw in a bit of everything, so that I can eschew consistency if I want to. And, you know, it’s a blog. And a Tohu Bohu besides. There’s a lot that I slide into this thing that upon later reading appears to be badly composed. Ah, well.
\nI imagine it must be very difficult to work the historical novel thing, or in fact any novel thing at all. The writer has to balance the reader’s experience of hearing (or “hearing”) the speech patterns of the type of person in the story with the actual researched type, with the reader’s own expectations of his own context, with the writer’s limitations and talents, and the whole house of cards is built on guesses, trust and instinct. And here I come and pull the whole thing down because I don’t like orthogonol<\/i>.
\nTolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger complains about the use of the word he can’t even spell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[199],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-litchrachoor"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18307,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11054\/revisions\/18307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}