I always have this problem with British mysteries, like Sherlock Holmes. They will have terms common to them and obscure to me. Like “the room contained a few chairs and a deal table”. After looking it up countless times I came to the conclusion that a deal table was cheap, made of scrap lumber slats with cracks between them, common in his day. Also a “baize door” seems to be one with a cloth panel instead of solid. Or maybe cloth over wood. And there’s also the odd reference that Google now reveals to be of out-of-fashion poets, long-gone prime ministers, or quaint seaside resort areas.
Good for you. A thing like that could give some people a case of the howling fantods.
I like the odd references and use them in my writing and cartoons.
It forces people who say “You know I usually get Mark’s jokes” to look things up.
And it’s interesting to me to see where the state of learning lies. For instance, if I make a reference to “Leopold and Loeb” people over 40 tend to understand it, those under 40 don’t.
On the other hand everyone knows Lizzie Borden. Perhaps it’d be easier to substitute one killer for another, but sometimes I don’t feel like it.
As one poster noted as long as the obscure thing is referenced it’s OK. For instance if I make a reference to “Leopold and Loeb,” you should be able to understand they were murderers even if you don’t know the details of their crime.
I had a comic where the two little boys are talking one of them white and one was black. The white kids says:
“Your lame dictators, Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe wouldn’t last a minute against Vera Bennett or Joan Ferguson.”
Now no one outside of Australia is likely to understand that reference. You have to see the cartoon but Aussie’s like it. No one else gets it. (It’s a reference to a TV show in Australia called “Prisoner”).
I think a lot of it depends on how you want your writing to hold up. While not exactly the same thing, here’s two good examples.
I love old time radio (OTR) and my favourites are Burns and Allen and* Jack Benny*. If I gave you some shows to listen to you’d be likely to get almost everything on Burns and Allen. But Jack Benny? I’d be less likely to say you’d find him funny.
Why? Jack is funny, he’s very funny, but so much of his show depends on references that are obscure or writing that is done in an off beat way. For example Jack will start a joke on one show and not give the punchline till his next show.
There’s so much of Jack Benny that is funny but I didn’t think he was funny till I started listening and realized the references he uses are from previous shows, from OTHER shows, from current topics.
On one hand, I agree that an author’s purpose is to be understood, and so should make every effort to make himself clear. On the other hand, there are things that can’t be simplified: one thing I see all the time are kids who have been taught vocabulary in terms of “simplest close synonym”, so that they think “melancholy” is a “smart” word for “sad” or “pungent” is a “smart” word for “smelly” and all they have to do is replace “real” words with “smart” words every time they have a chance and somehow that will make them good writers. Obscure terms are sometimes rather specific and sophisticated terms and there is a reason why that particular word is used and not any of its close substitutes. There is no way to interject a quick little summary of what it means, and in any case it would be a bit like pearls before swine: someone who lacks the vocabulary that expresses some nuance may well also lack the broader conceptual framework to appreciate that nuance.
This is a long digression, but it connects: every year, I teach “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, and every year I ask the kids about King’s use of extensive allusions. Why, I ask, do you think King pulled so heavily from the Bible, from works of Theology, from history? And every year, the kids start off with the same answer: “To sound smart”, usually followed by “why doesn’t he just say what he means?” Because they don’t know the works and the stories King is alluding to, they really don’t understand how, when King says “It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.”, he isn’t just referring to events, he’s tapping into a whole shared conceptual framework and that all sorts of pressures are applied there, in terms of his audience’s own view of themselves and of history. King isn’t “trying to sound smart”, he’s talking like a smart person to other smart people, and is able to convey a lot more because of it. When a writer is discussing something of great weight and subtle nuance, he often needs terms and references that convey that complexity, and that’s perfectly cromulent by me.
They are not responsible for explaining terms, they didn’t make up. Look up words if you don’t know them and care about it.
Heh. I just finished A Tale of Two Cities, and I had exactly this problem. Many times in the book he’d use what was probably a perfectly common term in his day, but I’d have no idea whether it was referring to a person, a concept, or an object. Dickens enjoys metaphors to such a degree that it’s often hard to figure out from context whether he’s speaking literally or figuratively, when you don’t know what the key subject of the sentence is.
I was a little dismayed, since I’ve recently read some Dumas without this problem. I decided that Dumas was easier to read precisely because it’s been translated: the modern-day translator used modern-day language in the process of translation. Dickens can offer no such assistance to the reader: the words you read are the exact words he wrote 150 years ago.
Great book, but often quite difficult to read for this reason.
So what, exactly, should Arthur Conan Doyle have done? Avoid words and references that, while readily understandable in the Victorian British culture he was writing for, might turn out to be confusing to someone half a world away and a century later? How would any author go about doing that?
Or are you suggesting that someone should bowdlerise the Holmes stories by removing or substituting any term which a modern-day American might conceivably find obscure? Would you really consider that an improvement?
For God’s sake, when you come across a word you don’t understand, look it up in a decent dictionary and relish the new knowledge that information provides. You’ll have improved your vocabulary, understood the world a little better and helped yourself envisage the book’s setting or characters in all the precision its author intended.
I don’t feel that an author (just for the record, I am one) has a responsibility to explain words. An author doesn’t have any “responsibility” except to write something he likes that someone else will pay for so he can feed his family.
That said, it’s a pretty darned good idea to do so.
I write technical nonfiction and children’s science/nature books. In those, you bet I explain my words. That’s what the books are for. I’m teaching people things.
In a novel, on the other hand, writers are imparting local flavor and building a sense of place. If I’m writing a story set in New Orleans and I use no cajun/creole slang, it won’t sound authentic.
A well-written story can impart the meaning without resorting to characters having to explain every word they use, though.
I don’t think anyone is saying Doyle (or Dickens) should’ve done anything different. Saying that a certain cultural reality makes reading a particular text difficult does not imply criticism of the author; nor do I think your brilliant idea of using a dictionary is completely unfamiliar to anyone here. Nevertheless, I and probably others find that stopping a narrative to go find a dictionary can interrupt the flow of a story severely enough to not always make it worthwhile.
These children will grow up to write Lord Foul’s Bane.
I believe that the answer to the OP’s question is that writers do not have a responsibility to use only words that you already know. Good writers write in a way that either the meaning is clear in context, we care enough about the book to wait for the explanation, or we care enough about the book to go look it up in a reference.
The writer has the responsibility to use the *right word *every time. As Mark Twain said, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
I think you may have missed the joke, because the Lemony Snicket books parody this kind of thing. Adults like Mr. Poe are in the habit of explaining what words mean to the orphans, but they hate this because they are well-read children and he explains words that aren’t all that difficult. There’s also a running gag throughout the series where the narrator will use a word in a sentence, then say “a word which here means…” and provide a “definition” that isn’t actually the definition of that word at all – something like “The orphans trudged toward the cul-de-sac, a word which here means ‘a place toward which one is being forced to walk by an evil Count.’” Sometimes the word being defined is fairly simple and the definition given is if anything a more difficult word, like “faking, a word which here means ‘feigning’”. When an actual helpful definition is provided, it’s often an interruption from the narrator right before the context that would make the meaning of the word obvious.
Pretty much. Deal was cheap pine.
Lamia, probably I did miss a joke. I found it too irritating to stick with and have never read more than a page or so. That’s OK, there are lots of good books around for me to read.
Just sort of echoing what others have said, that I think it depends on the context and the degree of obscurity and the importance to the plot.
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Some terms have just become obscure to us because of the passage of time or being in a different country. Sherlock Holmes has been metnioned, where Watson’s contemporary audience understood terms but folks living a century later, don’t. Fortunately, there’s a solution to this one: THE ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES by W.S. Baring-Gould includes footnotes that explain many of the terms that have become obscure. And it’s available cheap at used book sales etc.
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Some authors use foreign language or partial quotations, or are deliberately trying to write at a more educated level. Manda Jo cites M L King above, and Dorothy Sayers is another example. Her characters are often speaking French, or giving the first part of quotes, and she expects her readers to be able to understand. Fortunately, it never interferes with the plot, so I can mark the place with a stickie and keep reading for enjoyment, and then go back and look it up (or try) later.
I don’t think an author has any “responsibility” or “obligation” to explain, but a good author will at least want his/her contemporary audience to not miss major plot elements or character developments, nor to have to break the reading to rush to a dictionary. On t’other hand, I don’t see any way that an author can expect non-local, non-contemporary audiences to be able to understand. There would be readers today who wouldn’t understand a reference to dials on a TV set, for example.
I have a dictionary and thesaurus, I know how to turn pages and read down columns. Can can work, Google, Jeeves and Wikipedia. I don’t need an author to dumb down his/her writing to suit the lowest common denominator.
Also have a Dictionary of Euphemisms, which makes for some wild reading
That’s why I got A Sea Of Words, a companion reader to the series. I simply had to know the meanings of the terms drowned baby, barky, lascar, hawser, and puddening, to name a few. Unfortunately, even the writers of this book have failed to discover the meaning of “marthambles”.
What a false premise. YOU’RE the one suggesting he should have done something else. Don’t try to put words into MY mouth. I’m quite happy with Doyle.
I agree that the author has no obligation to explain terms. Sometimes, half the fun is trying to figure out what is being said.
David Mamet does a great job at this. He’ll have people who are good at their jobs discuss the work to be done and expect that the other knows what he’s saying. The context supplies what is essential knowledge for the reader/watcher and if you understand more than the essentials, its just gravy. The fact that he doesn’t talk down to you is part of the enjoyment of his stuff.
Oceans Eleven is another good example, where two master thieves discuss how to break into a casino vault and use jargon that’s incomprehensible, but you still kinda know what’s going on. And when you watch it again and know what people they hired and what terms would be used to describe them, it adds a level of enjoyment.
A final example is Denis Miller (at least back when he was funny) who constantly makes reference to obscure terms/people/events and expects you to go along with him. Part of what makes (made?) his act enjoyable is the little personal back pat you give yourself when you can say, “Not only did I understand what he was referencing, I understand why it’s funny!”
I LOVE it when authors don’t talk down to me.
phreesh said:
That’s 9/10 of xkcd.
I dunno about that, I only read one of that series and found it dull, but I love the Hornblower series, and I assume it’s the same situation. I never bothered to look up the nautical terms, I just treated them as if they were science fiction jargon terms that made sense to the characters but not to me. Hornblower would attack the French ship by unexpectedly hoisting the mizzen and avasting the bos’um while firing all the canons on the helmside. It was just like Kirk saving the Enterprise by reversing the polarity of the dilithium crystals – sci fi jargon. I didn’t need to know exactly what the hell they were talking about, to enjoy the story.
Pudding, possibly a mangling of barkentine, a british sailor recruited from the colonies (eg, East India), a mooring-line, a woven fender (had one of those on the bow of the dingy. Very fancy looking, and very durable.)
Marthambles? Never heard the term before, but from the term in context? It’s griping in the guts. Or dysentery.
(Sorry, I’m from a family of sailors… well, and book collectors.)
… I have known many bo’suns I would like to kick in the avast, but I tell you, it don’t win battles.