The gr8 deb8

Many years ago, I was present while language changed before my eyes.

It was in the sixties; the laser had recently been invented, and I was using one of the first, for research. LASER, as you know, is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, but it soon became a word on its own, subject to inflections and conjugations.

I still remember the first time I heard "lase" used as a verb ("I hope it lases without a lot of realignment;" "it lased for a while, then quit."), and "lasing" as an adjective (How's the lasing action this morning?")


I was astounded that for the first time in my awareness there was a new word, not one rooted in Latin or Greek or any other foundational language.
In the fifty years since, many other changes have taken place: new usage, new vocabulary, new spelling.

It's easy to guess what motivates some of the severely abbreviated language we're seeing these days: using a 3-inch keyboard with 1/4-inch keys that butt against each other with a fingertip that's at least 50% wider. We aim for as few strokes as possible to get the message across.

I read that 82 million people regularly text, and many more email. To accommodate Maddie Porter, my 11-year-old protagonist in the Miniature Mysteries, I've researched and bookmarked netlingo sites.

The main characteristics are
1. Abbreviations and acronyms, such as LOL for laugh-out-loud and BTW for by the way;
2. Letter/number homophones, such as gr8 and b4.
3. Nonstandard spelling, such as luv and cuz.

Texting and email language affect not only spelling, but grammar.

I often omit "I" in emails. For example, I usually sign off, "Hope all is well." With my address in the "from" line, it should be clear who's doing the hoping.

Wonder if the use of subject pronoun will go the way of romance languages. In Italian, "I hope" is simply "spero." No one uses the "io" for "I" unless she wants to emphasize the I, as in: I, of all people hope (and probably you don't).
I (for emphasis) embrace the change.

Most of the changes we see today simplify, rather than complicate, our language, and I see that as a change for the better.

How about you? As writers, do you have your characters speak "correctly" or do you accommodate different ages and usages?

As readers, how do you react to new usage in a book?

Talk to the Animals

There was a story in the news not long ago about how a dog running on a freeway was saved when his rescuer realized from the collar he wore that he might understand not English, but German commands. She told him “platz” - down - and was able to save him.

This was fascinating but not necessarily a surprise. People obviously don’t need to speak English to teach their dogs obedience skills. They’ll use whatever language comes most naturally to them--maybe more than one, in families where multiple languages are spoken. In addition, police dogs are sometimes trained in other countries, so their handlers have to learn the commands the dogs know so they can be utilized best.

I did some Googling and came up with websites that translate common commands into other languages. For example, “sit” is “sitz” in German, “assis” in French, “sedni” in Czech and “zit” in Dutch. “Stay” is “bleib” in German, “reste” in French, “zustan” in Czech and “blijf” in Dutch. The websites I referred to didn’t have translations of “slay”--probably a good thing--but they didn’t directly help me translate the title of my first Kendra Ballantyne, Pet-Sitter mystery SIT, STAY SLAY. Why Czech and Dutch? The sites said they’re popular training languages. I would have assumed that here, in the U.S., Spanish would be another popular training language, but these sites didn’t include it.

There are also lots of websites that help people interpret their pets’ body language so they know what their pet is trying to convey. Some of them seem fairly self-explanatory, like a dog wagging his/her tail or baring teeth.

In my pet-sitter mysteries, Kendra Ballantyne tells the stories in first person, and she sometimes expresses frustration at not being able to communicate with her dog Lexie, or other dogs, in Barklish, which I intend to mean some kind of straightforward interspecies language. There are definitely days I wish I could communicate with my Lexie and her young Cavalier friend Mystie in a language we all understood.

Then there are my shapeshifter stories for Silhouette Nocturne. My shapeshifters belong to a fictional covert military agency called Alpha Force, and they have a special elixir that not only allows them to shapeshift mostly at will, but also to maintain their human understanding. Those creatures can’t speak English or another human language while in animal form, but they definitely can interpret it.

How about you--how do you communicate with your pets? How would you like to communicate with them?

--Linda