New Word Included in Dictionary? Meh

It’s true. “Meh” is now in the Collins English Dictionary. I’ve never used the word, in print or otherwise, but I see it a lot, and I really admire the people who get it right. To me, it always read like a three-letter shrug; the people who really get it insert it into their text so that the reader actually sees that shrug.

It makes sense, too, that it’s in the dictionary. “Meh” fills a linguistic need, a gap: English really didn’t have a single word to express indifference the way “yes” or “no” work. “Meh” is as good as anything else, especially now that “whatever” has been Paris Hiltonized to death.

The rise of the cybersphere has created a whole new emphasis on the written word. People use email, text, MSN, chats, forums, Facebook, MySpace, blogs, whatever … they communicate in writing, not by voice, and so all kinds of crud has crept into the vernacular. The first time I heard someone actually say “LOL” at the end of a remark, I cringed. But I like it when people write “meh.” Do they say it? Never actually heard it. But I’m sure they do.

The Collins people asked the public to suggest new words for their latest dictionary, words that had come into use but were not “official.” Meh won. Others, as reported by The Associated Press, include: “jargonaut” (a fan of jargon); “frenemy” (an enemy disguised as a friend); and “huggles” (hybrid hugs and snuggles). I absolutely love jargonaut, but I’ll take a huggle.

The best part of this? Wherever the word came from, pretty much every expert agrees it was made famous on The Simpsons. The idea that I live in a world where the Simpsons can enhance and augment the language makes me smile. No indifference here.

Blue Rose: The Books of Peter Straub

Peter Straub is probably my favourite author, but it’s a strange relationship. Some of his books are annual must-reads for me, while there are others I’ve never finished.

I read a lot. I read for a living, and I read for fun. I’m probably a four-book-a-week guy, and I like reading the same books over and over again. I draw comfort from that, and it’s always fun to find new details or new themes that I missed before.

Peter Straub is good for that, particularly his Blue Rose trilogy. More on that in a bit.

My first Straub exposure was probably a lot like yours: The Talisman, his collaboration with Stephen King. I was a pretty big King fan in the early 1980s (not so much anymore), and so when Talisman came out I read it immediately. And it made me think that Peter Straub was probably just like Stephen King; off I went to the used bookstore, where I found Ghost Story, Floating Dragon and Shadowland. And they were terrible. Well, I thought so, at the time. I didn’t know about his earlier, non-scary novels, and still don’t, to be honest with you. But those first books I tried just didn’t interest me.

Over the next few years, I found other fine horror authors, particularly the late Michael McDowell, to enjoy, and never went back to Straub. But he was doing something different in those years, slowly shifting away from horror and into something new. So it would have been around 1990 that I was at the library and spotted a new Straub book called Mystery. I read the flyleaf and thought it sounded interesting; it wasn’t a scarefest but instead an actual mystery novel about a teenager and a murder.

I read it in one sitting.

This ignited my Straub fixation. I went and found his previous novel, Koko, a story of Vietnam, murder and obsession. Something twigged with me about Koko; there were a few strange elements that ran parallel to Mystery, similarities, odd things. A character in Koko wrote a book that’s mentioned in Mystery, for instance, a book about something called the Blue Rose murders.

A couple of years later, out came a book called The Throat … and this is where things got weird. It opens with a character from Koko, the author Tim Underhill, talking about how he wrote Koko and Mystery with Peter Straub, and based them on true events, but changed things around. The Throat is the story of how Underhill goes back to his home town and finally learns what really happened, what the Blue Rose murders were and how he and Straub got it wrong. These books, separate yet tied together, form The Blue Rose trilogy. You can read all or only one, but you should always read The Throat last.

This is absolutely brilliant metafiction. I’ve been reading these books for close to two decades now and I still find new layers to peel back. If you have the patience, these are books you should read.

Straub followed these up with two standalones: The Hellfire Club and Mr. X. The Hellfire Club is another book about a book, a story about murder and secrets and a psychopath named Dick Dart. It’s a wicked thriller and achieves the same surreal level of dreamscaping as the Blue Rose trilogy.

Mr. X is very different, and veers back into the supernatural. It’s my favourite of all Straub’s books. Mr. X is the story of a young man, his strange family, a secretive figure obsessed with Lovecraft, and what may or may not be time travel. I find something new in it every time I read it.

His most recent novels, Lost Boy Lost Girl and In The Night Room, take surreality to a whole new level. He brings back Tim Underhill, who investigates a crime in the first book, then writes the first book in the second book … it’s very hard to explain.

What Straub does with these books is trick you into believing what he’s writing, then turn it around until you have to ask yourself what you just read. He takes the concept of the unreliable narrator to a stratospheric level, weaving layer after layer of story around you until you’re lost in it. He sets his tales in strange, congested places, housing developments, empty houses, old neighbourhoods, full of physical twists and turns and dead ends that mirror his writing. His characters come to life with their first line of his perfect dialogue. It’s literary magic.

In In The Night Room, Straub raises the idea of “the perfect book.” Underhill is confronted with the idea that not all copies of a novel are the same; one is slightly different, with a measure of variance in its content, so that it’s the perfect book for the right reader. This, I suppose, is why some people love a book that others despise. A book has to speak to its reader in a voice that reader wants to hear. For me, the Blue Rose trilogy, Mr. X, The Hellfire Club and, to a lesser degree, Lost Boy Lost Girl and In The Night Room speak my language.

Like I said up top, I’ve still never finished some of his earlier books, Ghost Story in particular, and I probably never will. Unless I find the perfect copy. Or until.

Mangled Language (Mangluage?)

As you may know, I’m a newspaper editor. I work at a newspaper with a large staff, many of whom are just starting out. I’ve taught writing and critical thinking. And I have three little kids. So I deal with a lot of rookie writers.

Sometimes, when I’m just overwhelmed by the abuses young reporters can heap on this language of ours, I stop by this website for a chuckle. It helps remind me, too, that English is a difficult language to learn, let alone master — and that goes for people who’ve been using it all their lives, not just foreign types.

That would be how things like this happen:

Yes, English is funny.

Barack Obama, Unintentional Muslim

I deal with politics for a living. At work, I also deal with business, human interest, crime and stupidity. I spend a lot of time thinking about language. And I blog for fun.

Here’s an example of all those things coming together beautifully.

This is a blog post by Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times. It turned up on digg.com’s front page, and for good reason: it’s a brilliant piece of journalism.

Go read it.

New Canada, eh?

There are certain jobs most journalists consider the top of the heap. The big guns of print, for instance: The Washington Post, the New York Times, The L.A. Times, the Globe & Mail, Time, etc.

Among these is The Wall Street Journal. More than a financial bulletin, it’s a daily newspaper that stands as the journal of record for American commerce. Young reporters fight their way through the system to one day land at the Journal. It’s one of the few publications in the world with a name that stands as a major brand of its own. Its reporters, editors and columnists are among the best and brightest in the world.

They just don’t know who lives north of them.

Consider this correction that just ran in the WSJ’s weekend magazine: An Aug. 9 essay on Jamaican runners in Weekend Journal that referred to Jamaican immigration to Canada in the 1960s incorrectly identified Canada as New Canada. Separately, an Aug. 16 Olympics article on Canada’s medal count incorrectly referred to the country as the Commonwealth of Canada.

Twice in the same month? Come on. We’re called Canada. It’s on your map. Look for Detroit, then look up. CANADA.

This correction and many others are available at one of my favourite websites, Regret the Error.

Writing Good, Part 4

Here are some words people use incorrectly.

Unthaw: You can’t unthaw something. Well, you could, but there’s a better word for it: freeze.

Irregardless: Do you really need this one explained? It isn’t even a word.

Nauseous: You probably mean nauseated, unless you’re barfing in front of other people. Then you should just go ahead and say “naushous” and wear tighter trousers.

Lay: You can’t lay down. You can lay something down. But you can’t, yourself, lay down. You lie down.

Ironic: Most people are better off just not even trying to use this word.

Pristine: It doesn’t mean ‘clean’. It means ‘in its original state.’ There are parts of the Amazon that are filthy, muddy shitholes filled with bugs and snakes, and they are pristine.

Enormity: When someone says ‘You’re failing to grasp the enormity of the situation,’ he’s not saying something is really huge. He’s saying it’s really evil and terrible. The holocaust was an enormity. 9/11 was an enormity. An expensive wedding is not an enormity. Well, maybe not at the time, but just you wait.

Nation: You probably use ‘nation’ and ‘country’ interchangeably. But you shouldn’t. A country is a geopolitical entity. A nation is its people. “We the people of this great nation” doesn’t mean “we who live on this particular section of land.” it means “we who are linked by citizenship.”

Check my links down there to the right for a good general usage page I always find helpful.