The Accidental Author, The Basics, Part 2

Words, or Why is this Mona Lisa Smiling?

If you hadn’t tumbled to it already, this section on The Basics represents something of a departure from the earlier, intensely personal tone and substance of the Introductory blogisodes. I’ll get back into that mode soon enough, I promise, but this magical mystery tour through the basics of English vocabulary, grammar, style, and usage seems to call for a more detached, objective treatment.

And what better place to start than with that most basic of Basics, that old sine qua non of language itself …

Le Mot Juste

In the effort to follow The Accidental Author’s corollary to Heinlein’s First Rule of Writing (“You must write right”), finding the right word is tantamount.

No. It’s not. It’s paramount! (Just checking that you’re paying attention.)

The French equivalent, more or less, for “the right word” is “le mot juste” — a turn of phrase which once inspired sf author Spider Robinson to invent the tale of a New York writer who would buy a round of drinks for the crew of the Missouri whenever that battleship was in port, because he was always looking to get the Mo’ juiced.

Sorry about that.

In any case, finding the right word, le mot juste, can be critical in life as well as literature. Jon Knox, the quasi-hero consultant of my first novel, Singularity, certainly finds it so: his whole philosophy of management consulting boils down to wielding the right word as a lever long enough to overcome the inertia of entrenched organizational attitudes and shift the focus toward a mutually-acceptable solution.

But, reverting to the craft of writing proper, perhaps the best way to illustrate the importance of choosing the right word is to contemplate what happens when the wrong one is chosen instead. Fortunately, as indicated in the immediately preceding blogisode, we have a veritable cornucopia of horrible examples ready to hand, drawn from the oeuvre of an author whom, for reasons that shall soon become painfully apparent, I’ve dubbed —

The Kludgemeister

Once upon a time, before he turned his hand to world domination, literary division, Dan Brown did a stint as an English teacher at his prep-school alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy. And, while I suspect his former students may be due a rebate, Dan still has many lessons to teach us.

(Parenthetically, one good reason to pick on Dan is that, with sales of the Da Vinci Code topping 70 million worldwide, there’s a 1-in-100 chance that any random person on the face of the planet will own a copy. So you can’t cop out by saying you couldn’t check the references. Six degrees of separation indeed!

(As to those references — and at the risk of further sub-parenthesizing this already parenthetical remark — I’m drawing my examples from the following editions of two of Dan’s early published works:

· Angels & Demons, paperback, Pocket Star Books, 2001 (hereafter “A&D”).

· The Da Vinci Code, hardcover, Doubleday, 2001 (hereafter “DVC”).

Whenever I quote from either of these works in the text below, I’ll tell you where to find the cited passage in a bracketed annotation consisting of one of the above three-letter title abbreviations plus a page number.))

Anyway, back to the books.

But before I launch into their multitudinous faults, a couple provisos are in order. To begin with, truth be told (and, let’s face it, what else are blogs good for? (just kidding!)) — I kinda like Dan Brown’s stuff, in a guilty-pleasure, potato-chips-and-salted-peanuts sort of way.

At times, Dan’s prose even achieves a degree of lyricism. Check out, for example, his description of Castel Gandolfo [DVC, 149], or the vision that inspires Robert Langdon to solve the riddle of the cryptex [DVC, 420].

Such moments, alas, are all too rare. The overall fragrance wafting off Dan’s work smells of awkwardness, of artlessness raised to the level of art. In the world of programming where I used to spend most of my waking hours, this kind of inspired clunkiness is called a “kludge.”

And as I hope you’ll agree after reading this, Dan Brown richly deserves his title of “The Kludgemeister.”

Asleep at the Switch?

Not that it’s all poor Dan’s fault. On their way out into the world, his books did, after all, pass under the gaze of folks with some claim to being professional men and women of letters — namely, his agents, editors, and publishers. Yet, not only did none of them address the many stylistic gaffes we’ll deal with in this and subsequent blogisodes — no one, as far as I can tell, ever even troubled to have Dan’s text copyedited!

Don’t believe me? How else would you explain this gem:

The man stood, straightening his jacket. “His master requests that you make yourselves at home.” [DVC, 226]

But the standing man in question is Remy the butler, and it’s clear from context that the “master” he’s referring to is his own employer, Sir Leigh Teabing. Surely Remy would have said “My master” (as he did only six pages earlier [DVC, 220]), and not “His master”?

I suspect what happened here is that the offending quote started life as a pure descriptive passage, or perhaps as indirect speech, something like:

The man stood, straightening his jacket. His master, he explained, had requested that they make themselves at home.

Then, somewhere along the line, somebody decided this passage would work better as dialog, but failed to follow through on the pronominal implications. Point is, no copyeditor worth his or her salt would have let this one go undetected and uncorrected.

Sorry, folks, that’s all the exculpation we’ve got time for. Next order of business is to grab your copies of A&D and DVC and prepare to sink your teeth into the mystery meat of Dan Brown’s prose.

Master of Malaprop

A malapropism is simply a case of the right word in the wrong place. Once again, we have the French to thank: mal à propos means something like “ill suited to the purpose.” But the term owes its English naturalization to Richard Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals — more particularly, to Sheridan’s character Mrs. Malaprop, who was given to saying things like “He is the very pineapple (= pinnacle) of politeness.”

Malapropism is to be avoided at all costs, as being hazardous to your authorial health. At best it’s sure to render your serious, sober-sided scrivenings unintentionally hilarious. At worst it can reduce them to utter incomprehensibility. We’ll see examples of both below, because …

Move over, Mrs. Malaprop — here comes Dan Brown!

Let’s start with a minor example of the genre, a warm-up, if you will. Here’s a line from the scene in Angels & Demons where Maximilian Kohler, director-general of CERN, helpfully expands the acronym “GUT” for ace Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon:

“General Unified Theory,” Kohler quipped. [A&D, 24]

All well and good, except that, in physics, “GUT” stands for “Grand Unified Theory.” Strictly speaking, this isn’t a malapropism, I suppose. I mean, there could be a General Unified Theory of something or other out there somewhere. Maybe even a GUT (or GLUT) of Mrs. Malaprop’s pineapples (after all, if A&D’s heroine Vittoria Vetra can disprove one of Einstein’s fundamental theorems with a school of tuna fish [A&D, 49], all bets are off). But taken in context, it’s just wrong.

A mere bagatelle, you say. I beg to differ: in a book whose plot so intimately intertwines with antimatter and cosmology, the author ought to at least try to get the scientific terminology right. Particularly when the “quip” in question is being attributed to the head of Europe’s premiere particle physics laboratory.

Be that as it may, let’s move on to less questionably quibblesome instances. Here’s Langdon rehearsing the pseudo-history of the Illuminati, and their baleful influence on the likes of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, both of them described as —

…honest, God-fearing men who were unaware of the Illuminati stronghold on the Masons. [A&D, 39]

Problem is, a “stronghold” is a fortress or citadel. Not exactly the sort of thing you’d likely be unaware of, especially if you were the Mason it was sitting on. No, I suspect Dan meant to say “stranglehold” here.

This is a particularly good example of how insidious a malapropism can be: it’s so close to being right that it’s hard to see what’s wrong with it. The lesson here is: keep your guard up — if a word sounds slightly off, slightly discordant, trust that feeling.

Next up, we’ve got:

A chopper appeared, arching across the open valley toward them. [A&D, 49].

The trouble here is that “to arch” means to span some space from one side to the other. Remember the first line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord Hymn — the poem we all learned in high school — about “The rude bridge that arched the flood.” That’s what “arching” is all about.

So, we’d have to be talking one very elastic, very elongated helicopter, to arch across an entire open valley like that. Or does Dan perhaps mean “arcing”?

Illuminati again, this time we learn that —

Their roots reach wide. [A&D, 66]

Except it’s typically branches that “reach wide.” Everywhere, save (evidently) in Dan Brown’s garden, roots tend to “run deep.”

Or how about:

A single sentient thought began pounding at Vittoria with unrelenting force. [A&D, 104]

Last time I looked, “sentience” referred to the ability to sense or perceive, to be aware or conscious. Thoughts are things that we may perceive or be conscious of; they are not, so far as we know, perceptive or conscious in their own right.

Shifting gears now into the theological realms that make up marrow and bone of Angels & Demons, here we have Commander Olivetti, head of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards, staunchly proclaiming,

“I am a sworn defendant of the Catholic Church.” [A&D, 133]

For someone named after a typewriter, you’d think Olivetti could get his typography straight. Since he is neither being sued, nor indicted, by the Vatican, I think we can safely assume that Dan meant to say he is a sworn “defender,” rather than “defendant,” of the Catholic Church.

But Dan’s just getting started in his somewhat skewed take on Catholicism. How about this one, also uttered by the theologically inept Olivetti?

“The camerlengo is only a priest here. He is not even canonized.” [A&D, 135]

Saints preserve us! I’m not a Catholic (nor do I play one on TV), but last time I checked “canonization” meant elevation to sainthood — “to place in the canon [i.e., catalog] of saints, to glorify” as Webster’s puts it. I can’t think that Dan had the glorificational meaning in mind, or he wouldn’t have coupled it with the de-emphasizing, demeaning “even” intensifier — “He is not even canonized” — implying that, whatever else it is, Brownian canonization is no big deal.

So, what could Dan possibly have in mind here? “Ordained,” perhaps? But ordination is the ceremony by which one becomes a priest in the first place. That makes an unordained priest an oxymoron, so re-reading the passage as —

“The camerlengo is only a priest here. He is not even ordained.”

— would transform it into arrant, Monty-Pythonesque gibberish.

Whatever it is that Dan thinks he means by canonization, he must really, really think he means it, because he does it again! Check out:

“If the faith of a canonized priest did not protect him from the evils of Satan, what hope was there for the rest of us?” [A&D, 174].

What hope, indeed?

Then, too:

A career hazard of symbologists was a tendency to extract hidden meaning from situations that had none. [DVC, 171–2]

I’d make that “occupational hazard,” wouldn’t you? A “career hazard” is more like getting caught circulating e-mail pornography on your company’s intranet.

But the real point here is that you don’t need to be egregiously far off the mark to offend the inner ear of your readers.

Here’s another near-miss:

On all sides, towering bookcases burgeoned with volumes. [DVC, 173]

A neat trick, this, given that “burgeon” means “to grow or develop quickly; to put forth buds, to flourish.” The bookcases are already “towering,” and now they’re supposed to grow some more? — to sprout books, perhaps? Maybe Dan meant “bulged with volumes”?

Idioms, too, offer boundless opportunities for a dedicated Malapropian like Dan Brown.

Because deposits were protected from police inspection by privacy laws and were attached to numbered accounts rather than people’s names, thieves could rest easily knowing their stolen goods were safe and could never be traced to them. [DVC, 196]

“Rest easily”? But how hard could it be to rest?

“Rest easy” is one of those fossilized phrases, like “God Rest Ye Merry [not Merrily], Gentlemen” (and a ha’penny to you if you knew where that comma was supposed to go). Remember to repress the urge toward excessive grammaticality when confronted by these pesky idioms — they tend to break, not bend.

And while we’re on the subject, here’s another semi-idiom gone awry:

Langdon had harbored several fantasies about what they might find inside this box, but clearly he had been wrong on every account. [DVC, 197]

Um, shouldn’t that be “wrong on every count”?

Ooo, and now the stuff we’ve all been waiting for: malaprop with sex on top (glazed with Catholicism sauce):

Our ancient heritage and our very physiologies tell us sex is natural …
and yet modern religion decries it as shameful, teaching us to fear our sexual desire as the hand of the devil. [DVC, 310]

Well, okay. But I’m not sure “hand” is the best thing to use here (depends on what kind of sex Dan has in mind, I guess). Maybe he meant “tool of the devil”?

And speaking of hands:

Aringarosa had entered Gandolfo’s Astronomy Library with his head held high, fully expecting to be lauded by throngs of welcoming hands, … [DVC, 414–415]

I’ve really got to hand it to Dan. He deserves a hand, because, hands down, he has more trouble with hands than almost any other part of the human anatomy.

Here, Dan not only has hands performing the unlikely actions of thronging, and welcoming, he’s even got them lauding. I’m guessing he was misled by the superficial similarity between “laud” and “applaud.” Regrettably, other than both deriving from the Latin, the two words have nothing to do with one another: “applaud” comes from plaudere (“to strike,” by extension “to clap”), while “laud” comes from laus, laudis (“praise,” “commendation,” “glory”).

And there’s the real problem: as praise, “lauding” is what John Searle calls a “speech act.” It’s a quintessentially verbal action, in other words, something you do with language, with tongue or pen. Only in sign language, then, might it be possible to laud someone with your hands.

Talk to the hand, indeed!

You’d think Dan’s malapropiscatorial ingenuity would wane eventually. But, no, with less than a dozen pages before Da Vinci’s finis, he’s still going strong:

Andre Vernet was a dear friend of Jacques, and Jacques trusted him explicitly. [DVC, 443]

This should be “trusted him implicitly,” of course, but I think I follow Dan’s reasoning: If “implicit” is good, “explicit” must be even better, right?

Not in this case, unfortunately. “Implicit trust” is trust that goes without saying — “unquestioning or unreserved, absolute” trust, as Webster’s would have it. It’s a poor kind of trust that must be made explicit …

* * *

Well, I hope we can all agree that Dan Brown is far, far better off as a gazillionarie best-selling author than as an English teacher — where he would have definitely encountered a “career hazard” or two in years to come. And you can trust me on that, explicitly.

But now that we’ve burbled through the tulgey wood of his winning way with words, are we done with Dan?

Hardly. We’ve only scratched the surface.

Back next time with Dan Brown’s unique takes on English grammar. Stay tuned.