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on zee odder hand, Ah am le experte on ‘ow to write zee accent

This morning I heard a woman on the radio describe breast cancer as “…not just a disease; it’s your entire identity as a woman at stake,” and I would like to ask her to please speak for yourself darling, because my life is a teeny tiny bit more important than my tits, and I’d say goodbye to them in about one millisecond if it were a choice between life and death. This morning I heard a woman on the radio describe breast cancer as “…not just a disease; it’s your entire identity as a woman at stake,” and I would like to ask her to please speak for yourself darling, because my life is a teeny tiny bit more important than my tits, and I’d say goodbye to them in about one millisecond if it were a choice between life and death. No, I don’t think it’s that easy for everyone, no, I’m not talking about anyone but myself here.

Thirty years of the women’s movement, and all of this supposed progress leads to a woman calling two lumps of flesh a woman’s identity? Christ! One of Kitey’s friends who recently had a mastectomy refers to them as “the tits formerly known as mine”. Last I heard, she’s doing great. My identity as a human being is tied up in my mind, and my ability to think. Oh, and my opposable thumbs as well, I suppose. I can’t wait until someone refers to testicular cancer as “…not just a disease, it’s an emasculation.”

Rush Limbaugh would probably organize a ritual burning of the National Cancer Institute.

Last night we needed to run down to the grocery store and Todd said he wanted to drive, if that was okay with me, and he took a different route than we usually do go get there and pulled into the parking lot of a closed plant shop out in the country and smiled and said, “I thought you might want to get a look at the comet.” We got out of the car and stood in the parking lot, almost no cars were going by, and it was very quiet, the air had that heavy about-to-rain smell and we looked for a long time before getting back into the car. We were both silent for a moment and then I chuckled ruefully and said, “D’you know, all of these years of human beings running around on earth doing all of these ostensibly amazing things, and really we’re all nothing more than cavemen staring awestruck up into the sky, saying ‘Look! Light in sky! Pretty!’”

Todd was too tired to drive home, so I drove instead which made me feel useful and capable and glad, and lo and behold when I reacted to my driving mistakes with a grin and a shrug of my shoulders instead of obsessing over them I drove beautifully, better than I ever have before.

Dialogue is a tricky business. I hadn’t really thought about it too much until one day when I was trying to read Wuthering Heights and finally gave up on one character’s words altogether because they were incomprehensibly mangled into what was meant to be an accent. I mentioned it to my father and and we ended up having a fascinating discussion about dialogue and accents and what works, what doesn’t, and he showed me how one author (Faulkner?) had managed to flawlessly convey a heavy southern accent without one apostrophe or misspelling. He’d done it by putting the words together in the right order, by cutting out some and leaving others in. I was impressed. Ever since then dialogue has been something I pay quite a bit of attention to; I think the authors I love, like Beattie and Hoffman, have found the secret to believable dialogue in the realities they create. I bring all of this up because yesterday I was reading a rather poorly written mystery in which one of the character says, “…I sprinkled the berries on the snow,” and I’ve been puzzling over it and turning it over in my mind. Does it ring false (to my eyes/ears anyway) because of the word “sprinkled”? I think that if I were trying to convey the same concept I’d say “I dropped the berries on the snow.” People are so much less precise in speaking than they are when writing about something. But then I think well, gad, that quote above about cavemen is verbatim, and I wouldn’t necessarily find it believable if I were to find it in a book. Is the solution to keep dialogue simple? Or does it depend entirely on what atmosphere you’re trying to convey? Hmmm.

From the silliness file:

(Sage and Todd are at the grocery store, waiting in line at the checkout counter, and Sage is looking at the cover of People magazine.)

Sage: Sweetie, look at that. “Mourning After: Stars Who Have Lost A Child”. Charming.
Todd: Bill Cosby, Marlon Brando…who’s John Walsh?
Sage: He hosts America’s Most Wanted. He doesn’t count; he wasn’t a star until his kid died.

© 1997 QN Podcast (formerly Quirky Nomads).