Simple is (What's the word . . ?) Too Easy

have a personal confession to make. I love to focus on seemingly trivial details. Fortunately for someone such as me, I am living in an English speaking country, and America, which is even better for really mucking up the language. This luxury affords me endless hours of pleasure wincing at grammatical errors and equal dread for my own blunders. In ordinary conversation I have managed to avoid a great many phonetic aberrations that would betray the geographical area of my upbringing. Still, there is nothing in my speech that is unusual in comparison to those around me other than choice of verbiage. I have had several people ask if I am from England.

stopped reacting or even acknowledging the question years ago. I suppose that although I am perfectly happy to join in the banter with everyone else and employ the same language, when given the choice I opt for more exacting words. I also have a love for the melody associated with certain phrases. There’s just such a wonderful cadence to certain sounds and syllables strung together. I have a mild concern that my preoccupation (some would argue insistence) to ameliorate dialog will actually be detrimental to my writing. The reason this blog site is subtitled “Verbal Pyrotechnics” is due to that being the attribution of a college composition professor. Prior to reading one of my submissions he addressed the class with the disclaimer, “Try to get beyond the verbal pyrotechnics and appreciate what he is saying.” He was constantly engaged in a battle for me to use ordinary language. So many papers came back with red circles and chastisements exclaiming “ARCHAIC.” I tried to argue that the word was still valid and his retort was, “Only to you and Twelfth Century, English poets!”

evertheless I will guard against a good deal of the language I am comfortable using for the sake of the characters and even the narrative of my novels and other stories. I am exercising none of that in this missive because I still need a channel to let this stuff flow. The advantages of a blog is the freedom to just put oneself out there and kick off the shoes of rigor and civility and wiggle the toes a little. Besides, this forum presents me the opportunity to try a whole lot of things – that even if every one of them fails – I will benefit from the experience. This is a place to try experiments and test concepts and ideas. I hope it will knock both the rust as well as the unnecessary from my writing.