In fiction, well-chosen names can hook the reader's interest, telegraph information, and set a tone--all in a capitalized word or two. No one names her people and places with more skill and humor than J.K.Rowling. Her hero and his allies are ordinary people with ordinary names: Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger. (Yes, Hermione’s a complicated name, at least for American readers, but then Hermione’s a complicated girl!)
Contrast the names of the hopelessly incompetent: Cornelius Fudge, as effective at fighting evil as a piece of soft candy. Dudley, Petunia, and Vernon Dursley--I don't know why certain words just sound stupid, but Dursley is surely one of them! They live in Little Whinging (that's a soft g, from whinge, Britspeak for complain). Nearly Headless Nick, who couldn't even manage to lose his entire head.
Rowling often uses names to suggest evil or danger, sometimes deliberating misleading us to create suspense. Lord Voldemort, The Name That Must Not Be Said, means "flight of death" in French, though you don't have to know French to recognize the suggestion of death. Severus Snape of Slytherin positively hisses. The Dementors threaten insanity. Draco Malfoy's name, with its hard consonants and its every syllable accented, sounds like the curses he hurls, while his flunkies, Crabbe and Goyle, are merely pests. Bellatrix is a beautiful but diabolical woman (“bella” can mean “beautiful” or “warlike”—or in this case, both) who is always threatening “trix”). Lupin's name suggests "lupus," Latin for wolf.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
Suspended Sentences
If you were an English major, you've probably heard of loose and periodic sentences. If you were an English major like me, you could never remember which was which, and many sentences seemed to be neither--or both. So I was glad to come across the concept of sentence suspensiveness (say that fast five times!) in a series of lectures on CD by Brooks Landon. (Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft. Available at many libraries.)
Landon suggests throwing out the loose/periodic dichotomy and looking instead at where a sentence falls on the spectrum of suspensiveness. A sentence is suspensive to one degree or another if it delays the main clause--the core of the sentence--until the middle or end of the sentence. To cite a familiar example: "Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go." Or a better one by Rick Bragg: "In a graveyard where rows of crosses lean left and right, where one-inch-thin headstones bow to the earth or tilt toward the sky and misspelled missives to the dead are inked onto rotted plywood markers, Cleveland Cobb spent a long time making sure he got the flowers just right." Bragg's a good enough writer to trust that we'll stay with him on this ride, enjoying the view he sketches so vividly while we wait to see where we're going.
Landon suggests throwing out the loose/periodic dichotomy and looking instead at where a sentence falls on the spectrum of suspensiveness. A sentence is suspensive to one degree or another if it delays the main clause--the core of the sentence--until the middle or end of the sentence. To cite a familiar example: "Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go." Or a better one by Rick Bragg: "In a graveyard where rows of crosses lean left and right, where one-inch-thin headstones bow to the earth or tilt toward the sky and misspelled missives to the dead are inked onto rotted plywood markers, Cleveland Cobb spent a long time making sure he got the flowers just right." Bragg's a good enough writer to trust that we'll stay with him on this ride, enjoying the view he sketches so vividly while we wait to see where we're going.
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