A Million Years with You (39 page)

Some things have more than one noun associated with them, thus choice is involved, as in
meadow
and
field
. I've learned to look for implications, because as far as I'm concerned, a meadow is a field. But
meadow
conjures people wandering around and smelling flowers. You never hear of a corn meadow or a cotton meadow. In New Hampshire we have fields, and if cows are grazing in them they are pastures.

Sad to say, in my case, word choice isn't always inspired by a word's implications. I had a problem with the term
mountain lion
, which is what I would normally call these cats, but for my sixth book, in which I used the name maybe five thousand times, I got tired of typing all those letters and thought it would be easier to type
puma
. But after that, I became disillusioned with the word
puma
. It seemed fanciful. So in this memoir I call them
cougars
. They're also called
painters
and
catamounts
, but those names are countrified. I'm countrified myself, but I wouldn't want readers to see that.

On rare occasions, there may be no right word. I had a problem with
slime
, for instance, because
slime
is totally negative. One might as well say
goo
or
mucus
, because there is no pleasing alternative. I noticed this behind the exhibits of the Boston Aquarium where I met an octopus pup named Octavia. (The language police wouldn't like this. You don't
meet
an animal—you
see
it, because
meet
implies involvement by both parties, and
see
implies that you, as the highly evolved human individual, are viewing some dumb beast.) The young creature put one of her eight arms toward me and I stroked its outer surface. It was soft, and also—what?

I refuse to say it was slimy but can find no other word to describe it. Thus I'm left with no choice but to describe the inner surface of the arm, the surface with the suckers. These were small, strong, and prickly, and although Octavia was in the water, her suckers seemed almost dry as they fastened her arm to my fingers. My heart went out to this amazing little creature, with her intelligence, her awareness, and her clearly conscious mind. My friend Sy Montgomery, who was with me that day, was doing research for a book about octopuses, which was why we were at the aquarium. I knew she would find the right words for the thick, soft, slippery feeling of the waterproof substance on their skins.

 

My Rule Two involves usage based on ideology, and the most significant involves animals. For instance, there's the question of what animals do. If it's anything like what people do, such as
wonder
, I'm not afraid to say so, but plenty of people believe that it's just plain wrong. To attribute any human action to an animal, or worse yet, to actually recognize such an action in an animal, makes these people angry, as if the writer challenges their top position on the evolutionary pole. Rule Two says two things: (1) Ignore Those People, and (2) There Is No Evolutionary Pole.

The same people use the pronoun
it
for an animal. Not me, though. Rule Two says that animals must be
he
or
she
but never
it
except in special cases. In real life, all animals have gender. People are more inclined to acknowledge gender in their pets, but not even a maggot is an
it
, and to refer to any animal in that manner is an affectation, an ignorant stab at science-speak, a pathetic attempt at political correctness. Imagine if we spoke of people in this manner. “My friend wanted to cross the river so it took off its shoes and it waded across.”
²
I unfailingly use
he
and
she
for animals, also
who
and
whom
, never
which
or
that
, and speaking of the passions inflamed by words, I'm infuriated by people who find this improper. Who do they think they are? High and mighty humans getting
he
or
she
and
who
or
whom
while everything else gets the same pronoun as dirt? I'd like to shake those people. An editor may sometimes disapprove, but I'm firm about it.

 

Much as I love resonance, clarity is probably more important. Thus paying attention to what one is actually saying cannot be overstressed. One morning on the local TV news a newscaster reported that a man had been arrested for groping a woman inappropriately. Was there an appropriate way to grope her? Such mistakes are easy enough to make, but I hope I never make them.

I've also learned not to start a sentence with a dependent clause, or not often, because the reader shouldn't have to wait to learn what the sentence is about. Then too, if the reader ignores the punctuation, a clause beginning a sentence can be confusing, as in one of my own sentences:
Now it was gone so I walked. In the form of a falcon, Marmot slowly circled me a little while
. Here again, never mind what it means, but just please note that the above is two sentences with a period between them. One reader didn't notice the period so he took this to be
I walked in the form of a falcon
and he sneered at me because falcons don't walk, or not far. Since then, I've wished that the phrase about the falcon was at the end of the sentence. Not that I was wrong, and not that the sentence is unacceptable, but the book in which it appears was published fourteen years ago at the time of this writing, and the unfair criticism still burns.

 

I warn myself against passive voice. This is standard for the military, as in
the battle was won
or
the mission was canceled
rather than
the enemy won the battle
or
the high command canceled the mission
, thus hiding what actually took place. Passive voice is dry, and the only reason to write anything, in my view, is to provide full disclosure with as much emotion as can be squeezed from the material. Scientists also like passive voice, but might want to reconsider doing so. Too often when writing scientific papers they use sentences like this: “Relatedness among individuals has been suggested as a potential factor in individual associations between aggregating squirrels.”
³
Alas, the science that inspired this was riveting. The squirrels were also riveting. Readers would be on the edge of their chairs if the paper were written in a more lively manner.

I warn myself against expletive sentences. These start with an empty word such as
this
or
there
followed by some form of
to be
, as in
There is something limp about these sentences
, so these too can be boring. When I was in college, the writing teachers spoke against expletive sentences but I didn't listen, and while still in their classrooms, I started my first book with one:
There is a vast sweep of dry bush desert
etc. Gosh. Every book I've written has them—a bad habit but one that's hard to break because of the ease with which
It is
or
There is
can launch a sentence. From there you can throw in whatever you like without worrying too much about how you say it. Here a word processor can be helpful—you can quickly search through thousands of words for
it is
or
there is
and fix it. But I didn't do that so this book is probably riddled with them.

 

I try to go easy on modifiers. These suggest self-doubt on the part of the writer. Usually I find too many modifiers in my early drafts—mostly adjectives, but adverbs can also be overdone—and often enough, a point is better made without them. An unmodified word is stark, just standing there looking at you with nothing dangling around it. So if a word doesn't seem strong enough, rather than try to intensify it, I look for another word.
Very
is one of the worst modifiers (I was tempted to say
one of the
very worst modifiers
, but I controlled myself.) I'm more careful of the word
so
as an intensifier, as in
The air was so clear
. Never do that. Not if that's all there is to the sentence.

 

Clarity raises the question of double nouns. A few examples could be
moose festival, coffee table, horse whisperer, water park
, or
stone wall
. Editors once hated all but the most common of them (
coffee table, stone wall
), and would make a writer revise entire sentences to get rid of them. But I like them. A copy editor removed so many from my first book that I was forced to point out that she was the
copy editor
for a
book publisher
. Today they're more acceptable, but they can be confusing, and triple nouns are worse. Once while listening to National Public Radio I became confused by three nouns in a row of “NPR News Quiz.” Was the quiz about news? No, it was about all kinds of things and NPR News asked the questions. The word
news
thus belonged to
NPR
, not to
quiz
. It's not clear what else the quiz could be called, though, despite the problem.

Clarity also raises the question of word placement, especially pronoun placement. My grandson told the following joke. “Question: how can you drop an egg on the sidewalk without cracking it? Answer: sidewalks are hard to crack.” The joke is very important even if not very funny because it points out that a pronoun refers to the noun that precedes it, which a writer should never forget.

Then what about the pronoun
they?
It's plural, of course, so can it be joined to a singular subject? The language police wouldn't like it, and I try not to do it myself, but I believe that if someone wants to do it, they should. The clarity is not interrupted, and without it they'd have to write “he or she,” which is awkward, especially if often repeated, and makes the reader say with a sigh, “Oh please,” or “How persnickety.”

 

One cannot achieve clarity without thoughtful punctuation. Commas are the most controversial punctuations, and should be used sparingly. But they should be used. At one point they fell out of fashion and the with-it writers did away with them, which I think was inconsiderate. The reader's mind runs out of breath as it struggles through a long unpunctuated sentence. Perhaps those writers had second thoughts, or their editors did, because nowadays one sees more commas.

Where commas belong can be confusing, at least for me. Consider the following sentence:
They screamed at him to get back in the safari van but, with his headphones on, he didn't hear the warning
. To my way of thinking, the
but
belongs with the main message. The part about the headphones is just an observation. If the comma is after the
but
, the sentence could almost mean that they screamed at him to put his headphones on before he got back in the van. However, not every usage pundit would agree. They insist that the comma should come after the
but
. By showing me passages from books about style, grammar, and good usage, the copy editor of this book proved it to me, causing me to rewrite this section, which at first was a series of bitter remarks about copy editors who, in my other books, had moved my commas. Now it is a humble admission of error. But even now, in my mind, comma placement has the aura of a religious belief. Thus I'm like a confused pagan in some jungle village and the copy editor is like the missionary who is trying to save me. She is so impressive that I struggle to convert, and if all the commas in this book are correctly placed it's because she fixed a number of them.

I also have strong feelings about semicolons. To me, either a sentence ends or it doesn't; a semicolon begs the question. At first this book had only three semicolons, two of which are nearby because I was thinking about them and the third because my spell and grammar check insisted. Normally I use that device just for spelling because it's mindless when it comes to anything else—for instance, it thought that my sentence
nor could I shape-change into an animal
should be
nor could me shape-change into an animal
, so I pity the people who depend on such devices—but on that one occasion with the semicolon I hesitated for a long time, then decided that for once the device could be right and used a semicolon there despite my darkest doubts. The book now has twenty-nine semicolons thanks to my benefactor, the copy editor, and of course it's much better.

Finally, I try to be careful with symbols such as hyphens and dash marks—although I'm fond of hyphens and dash marks—but they make the writer's thoughts seem jumpy so it's best not to overdo them.

 

Rule Four has two parts, and the first involves style and uniformity.
We went swimming and sailing
is better than
we went swimming and sailed
. Another nice trick when listing words or phrases is to start with the shortest and end with the longest while preserving the uniformity. Take this sentence, for instance:
One was Antarctica, another was southern Tasmania, and another was the western third of southern Africa
. Originally this sentence was
One was Antarctica, another was southern Tasmania, and a third was the western third
. . . . Uh-oh, too many
third
s and the second is more important. Better to change the first even though that makes too many
another
s. On the bright side, though, having two sets of
southern-another
seems intentional, put there to give mass to the sentence. If I were grading the sentence I'd give it a B for effort, but perhaps I'm too soft on myself.

 

The second part of Rule Four involves originality. If a phrase or sentence seems familiar, Don't Use It. Not everyone believes this—one writer took passages from my book
The Hidden Life of Dogs
and published them as his own in
The New Yorker
, and an anthropology professor used passages from my book
Warrior Herdsmen
and published them as his own in
Natural History
. Of course that's outright plagiarism and honest people wouldn't do it. So here I'm thinking of overly common phrases. I'd avoid
in any way, shape, or form
, for instance, and I try to be careful of sunrises and pounding surf or anything else that's inspirational, because such things have been described since the dawn of literature. The basic tenet of Rule Four Part Two is Don't Be Trite.