Useful Answers to Difficult Questions

I have, for some time, been collecting useful answers - answers that can be used to respond to all manner of awkward, intrusive or just plain difficult questions.

So I'm going to share with you the best I have found... so far:

"That would be an ecumenical matter"

This comes from the wonderful, witty Father Ted comedy series. Ted attempts to present the appalling Father Jack as a still-functioning member of the clergy by training him to make this reply to any questions posed by a group of visiting bishops. I've tried it and it works - and not just with bishops! You might want to change 'ecumenical' for a similar but more contextual word like 'administrative' or 'ethical' The only problem is that the original is so well known amongst Ted fans, it has a subtext which says: 'I have no idea (a) what your question means, (b) what the answer is, or (c) what my opinions are on this matter.'

Works best with: technical or work-related . e.g. 'What is this company's policy on work/life balance?'

Doesn't work well with: direct questions. e.g. 'What time does it start?'

"I hear what you're saying but..." OR "I'm glad you asked me that..."

The classic riposte of the politician or hobby-arguer. It acknowledges the question, but puts it neatly to one side leaving you to launch on your own trajectory.

Works best: when, actually, you didn't hear what they were saying.

Doesn't work well with: direct questions. e.g. 'What time does it start?'

"Arguably."

This is the haiku of useful answers: short, neat, ambiguous. It acknowledges both the question and a panoply of possible answers, all of which you are obviously fully conversant with but which you consider rather old hat.

Works best with: leading questions. e.g. 'Don't you think this is the biggest load of nonsense?'

Doesn't work well with: direct questions. e.g. 'What did you have for lunch?'

"It depends what you mean by ....[insert a word from their question]"

Ah, the classic 'answer a question with a question' gambit. Pick up the questioner on a word or phrase in their question and twist the discussion into a neat exploration of semantics, deflecting attention from the original question. I've even got away with: 'What do you mean by 'mean'?'

Works best: with almost any question. e.g. 'What did you have for lunch?' 'It depends what you mean by 'have'.'

Doesn't work well with: people who are easily provoked to physical violence.

And now...

*DRUM ROLL*

... a new addition to the 'Useful Answers' Hall of Fame:

"Don't change the subject!"

This was in a comment on my earlier My dog has no nose post from Dave and I think it's a new classic. It's a little time machine packed into four words - you can use it to return to any point in the discussion (a point where you were on less shaky ground) and steer it on a new course from there.

Works best: almost any question, except...

Doesn't work well: when the conversation only begins with the question in question.

So... any more I should add to my list? ...And, more importantly - any questions?

What dreams may come..?

Poor old young Dave has been suffering disturbed nights over at Dave - The Blog and I sympathise.

Anyone who says to me: 'In your dreams' hasn't been there when the molten sky is falling and we few survivors are sheltering in caves, or when I come out of primary school one afternoon and it is years later and my family moved away a long time ago, or when everyone in the room is about to turn into a monster - but no-one knows which kind so you have to watch for snake tongues, claws...

As a child I lay awake in the fear of having nightmares. More recently I learned to quite enjoy them, their imagination. But they're still odd. My friend's husband is a clinical psychologist. He says it isn't what happens in your dreams, it's how you feel in them. And he says that everyone in the dream is really another projection of yourself.

But it could be worse...

I was in my 30's before I had even heard of sleep paralysis or 'night terrors'. It occurs when the consciousness is still awake while the body is shutting down for sleep and the symptoms are the inability to move, pressure on the chest, an acute sense of danger and terrifying hallucinations.

It's believed that the old idea of an incubus sitting on your chest comes from this and potentially a good number of 'ghost' sightings and 'alien abductions' - with the symptoms being so very realistically physical and so little heard about it.

Oddly, my first experience of sleep paralysis (that I remember) was not long after first reading about it. I had just moved house - one of the triggers can be a change in environment or lifestyle (and I've certainly had a brilliant flying dream after another house move.)

I 'saw' a malevolent, shadowy figure in the corner, 'heard' indiscriminate, but evil voices and felt a heavy pressure rolling over my body from head to toe. Throughout all this I knew I was wide awake. It was genuinely very frightening and would have been so much more so if I didn't have a clue what was going on. It's happened to me a couple of times since then and, whilst scary at the time, is fascinating.

After this, I started asking people whether they had heard of it or experienced it. And although most were blissfully unaware of it, I was shocked how many people had had it without it being common knowledge. At least three people I know have suffered from it on a regular basis all their lives - one even thought she could never marry because who would want to share the bed of someone who spent their nights in terror?

Around the world there are different beliefs about it and word for it. And guess what? The word nightmare is derived from the old Norse word 'mara' or... a goblin that rides on your chest.

So - how many of you have had this or heard of it? And -really - what is your worst nightmare?

Further Reading:
DARK INTRUSIONS: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences
Sleep Disorders for Dummies (For Dummies (Lifestyles Paperback))

I know it's a cliché but...

I am girding my loins

This year I will really put my shoulder to the wheel, both feet forward and 'my back into it'. I'll slather myself in elbow grease, knuckle down, take the future in both hands, keep my finger on the pulse, my eye on the main chance (and the ball) my ear to the ground, nose to the grindstone, both hands on the wheel (I may need more hands).

No - I'm not taking a course in contortion. I'm simply going to try harder to be a better writer. But there's something about trying harder that brings all the clichés home to roost - and 'better writers' should avoid them like the plague.

Wikipedia - which has clearly become this recumbent Earthling's 'Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy' - defines cliché as a phrase 'over-used to the point of losing it's original meaning or effect', but I would argue with that. More that it is so over-used it loses its original impact.

When I say 'If it ain't broken, don't fix it' that's exactly what I mean. It's just annoying that - especially as a writer - you're not supposed to reel out the same old tired phrases, but think of new ways of saying what you mean.

The word cliché is from the French printing term for a phrase so regularly-used that it is cast in its entirety rather than composing it from individual letters or words each time it is rolled out. This is also called a stereotype. (I used to think this meant 'typing with both hands'.)

'Cliché' is meant to emulate the sound of the metal being dropped into the matrix - a mold for casting letters or phrases. Oh, sorry - I shouldn't have told you that. I forgot..."no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself." Thanks, Morpheus.

Anyway - at the end of the day, when all's said and done...

Cliché Heaven

In cliché heaven
everything’s as right as rain,
they had a good innings,
and we’ll never see their like again.

In cliché heaven
death is not the end
and when you find Jesus,
you’ve found a friend.

In cliché heaven
saints and angels with Percil-white wings
are singing of millions of beautiful things,
and God in his wisdom,
God with his beard,
is moving in ways that are frankly weird,
dear God, his cherubs like elves,
is helping those who help themselves.

In cliché hell
after the candlestick, book and bell
we’ve come in a handcart
we’ve come with our cat
(who’s got no chance, we’re sure of that)
and the devil’s busy making plans
for all those lovely idle hands.

But in cliché heaven,
everything’s all right on the night,
everything’s coming up roses
and all’s well that ends well.

There's a nice slide show of where clichés come from on Life magazine's website

Writing on the Wall

One of the great things about working in the library is that I stumble across some very splendid books it wouldn't occur to me to look for.

I picked up the excellent Wall and Piece about graffiti superstar Banksy.

He has some very thought-provoking things to say about writing on walls:

"There is no elitism or hype... and nobody is put off by the price of admission."

"The people who run our cities don't understand graffiti ...they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit, which makes their opinion worthless."

"The people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message from every available surface but you're never allowed to answer back."

"...graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three kinds of people: politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers."

I have never really graffiti'd anything - except in chalk (made-up gods for the new religion I founded. aged 9 - which was frowned upon). Oh and I was a guest of the New Zealand Chalksters in Auckland last year - they take 'guerilla* poetry' out onto the streets quite literally with giant chalks - they make an impact but not a permanent (i.e. criminal) one.

What do you think? Free art or menace to society?

Scrawl your replies below...

Continued in this post

* No poems about gorillas, please.

The Oxford Comma... and friends

I first heard of the Oxford comma on one of Dogberry's posts at Inky Fool. 

Punctuation named after places? Whatever next? Apparently it's the comma that you could (but may choose not to) put before the 'and' in a sentence list. 

As an example, here's what Simon Says at Writers Bureau had to say on the subject:

"I dedicate this book to my parents, Martin Amis and JK Rowling."
...it suggests that this author is the love child of Martin Amis and JK Rowling! ...To clarify the sentence, we need to insert the Oxford comma, before the word 'and', like so: "I dedicate this book to my parents, Martin Amis, and JK Rowling."

But why is it called the Oxford comma? And are there other geographically-related punctuation marks I should know about? 

The Papworth Colon - for colons which need to be removed forthwith

Stratford-upon-Avon Quotes - for extravagantly-phrased theatrical spouting

The Westward Ho! exclamation mark - to describe exclamation marks used for decorative effect (including a sub section for multiple exclamation marks at Christmas - or the Westward Ho! Ho! Ho!!!)

The St Martins Lane* Apostrophe - in response to the Grocer's Apostrophe, this is for apostrophes notable only by their absence.

The Wallasey Ellipsis - any ellipsis with the wrong number of dots, which disregard the laws of God and man (in Wallasey there are no less than three roundabouts where the usual rules do not apply)

I'm not sure who should get custody of the Question mark:

Watford? Hooton? Howarth? Wensleydale? Somewhere in the Wye Valley?... or perhaps Pendle – where the whiches come from?

*cackles*

If there are any punctuation marks associated with place names that any of you have made up know of, do tell!

* No one's too rich to need the occasional apostrophe

Related post: My 10 Punctuation Pet Hates

Taking affront at a font

I've developed an aversion to serif fonts.

It's been coming on a while. But it's getting stronger. Every so often Word seems to forget my defaults and goes back to Times New Roman. I almost can't bear it any more.

They say a serif font's easier to read, more literary.  I particularly loathe the way some people print poems out in curly serif scripts you can barely read because 'it looks more poetic'. More poetic, my arse. If the words don't do it, don't make the font do it!

Some editors require your work in New Courier, which is even worse. They have their reasons - every letter is the same width, which is useful to them in ways we can not fully understand (or should I say, I cannot be arsed to research just now?).

But don't you think a nice sans-serif is much cleaner? It's rounder and more 'with it' in ways the expression 'with it' will never fully understand. Doesn't have to be Arial. Tahoma's nice too (oh, Tahoma!) and I use Trebuchet for this blog. I did go through a phase of doing everything in cheerful Comic Sans but it's generally considered to lack seriousness. (See right)

Two interesting facts about fonts:

1. Incidentally the word 'font' is from the same source as fondue  ('something which has been melted') after the casted molten metal typesets used to be made out of. 

2. According to Wikipedia (the 'font' of all knowledge) the reason sans-serif has become the font of choice on-line is because serif fonts can show twittering on the horizontal serifs. And that has nothing to do with Twitter!

So what is your font of choice, and how strongly do you feel?

 

Holy Wind, Batman!

I've been wanting to talk about wind for some time but I've been waiting for a really windy day.

You know how it is with winds - you're ages waiting for one than a bunch of them come all at once.

Dogberry of Inkyfool started me thinking, way back at the beginning of July with Some Winds where the windy origins of the words kamikaze and Chinook were discussed in his characteristically erudite manner.

But for me the most interesting thing about wind is this: Hebrew has far fewer words than English, and many words have to do the job of two or three English ones.

The word 'ruah' (the 'h' pronounced as in Scottish loch) is the word for wind, but also for breath, spirit and ghost. 

This explains why the 'Father, Son and Holy Ghost' of my youth became 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit'. I'm only disappointed they didn't settle for 'Holy Wind' or 'Holy Breath', but I get that what they're talking about is Holy 'Unseen Force' (and I hope you're impressed that I'm not adding 'Batman!' to the end of any of these - showing tremendous restraint, don't you think?)

There's more about 'ruah' in the Old Testament at the Franciscan Cyberspot - no, I'm not making that up - and the Vatican's website.  I particularly like the fact that the Vatican, when thus perplexed, has this to say: "In this regard it is better to give up in part the pretenses of neat reasoning in order to embrace broader perspectives." i.e. Translate it as fits best to your nefarious practices.

All of this only confirms one of my favourite quotes:

'Religion is man's attempt to communicate with the weather.' (origin unknown). 

Here's that part in The English Patient, where Count Almasy speaks of winds described by Herodotus (there's a transcript here about two thirds of the way down the page):

Blows me away, this!

National Double Entendre Week

Sorry to be bouncing off Moptop again, but her recent post which was (broadly) on the subject of euphemisms reminded me that it's that time of year again - when we thrust ourselves enthusiastically into the general spurting of thinly veiled obscenity that is National Double Entendre Week.

It seems to me that there's a thin line between euphemism and double entendre, and its even naughtier cousin innuendo.  I'm no expert in cunning linguistics  but I imagine Moptop's new best chum InkyFool could show us a thing or two.  But I do enjoyed getting my tongue around something risque now and then - it's one of my little foibles.  For example, I've just come back from an event at Toast in West Kirby where during my  slot my 'Road Rage' poem went down well.  I'm particularly proud of the line:  Girlie young things find it hard to be nippy / when they're stroking their Volvos and doing their lippy.

Some old favourites:

• A man encountered a woman on a  cliff-top path too narrow for them to pass on - he couldn't decide whether to toss himself off or block her passage.
• Then there's the story of the three volunteers late at the sperm bank: two missed the Tube and one came on the bus.
• Oh, and didn't Chris Tarrant say, discussing the first Millionaire winner Judith Keppel on This Morning: "She was practising fastest finger first by herself in bed last night."

And sports commentators are famed for them:

• Harry Carpenter at the Oxford-Cambridge boat race 1977 - "Ah, isn't that nice. The wife of the Cambridge President is kissing the Cox of the Oxford crew."
• Pat Glenn, weightlifting commentator - "And this is Gregoriava from Bulgaria. I saw her snatch this morning and it was amazing!"
• Willie Carson was telling Claire Balding how jockeys prepare for a big race when he said: "They usually have four or five dreams a night about coming from different positions." (More of these here.)

The trouble with double entendres is, once you let one go everything takes on a lewd second meaning and you start sniggering at the most innocuous of comments.

It helps if you are able to raise an eyebrow suggestively.This is harder than it looks. If you can't get it up or keep it erect you can resort to adding the phrase 'as the actress said to the bishop' to flag up your wit (or 'Phnar, phnar' if you are Uncultured).  There's even a campaign for an 'as the actress said to the bishop' button on Facebook.

So anyway - the possibilities are spread before you. It's National Double Entendre Week. Go on - slip one in, you know you want to.

A Problem Shard

I have a terrible confession.  I was just trolling through my Unfinished Work when I actually found *blushes* the word 'shard'. Worse.  The line went: 'He dozed a little then woke with a shudder, shards of dreams piercing his resolve.'   Aaaaaargh!
What's wrong with that?  You ask.  Well there ARE rules you know!  I feel certain Moptop will have strong opinions about this. Shard is just too 'poetic' and hence frowned on in poetic circles - but it still keeps trying to elbow its way in when you're not paying attention.

You could get away with it in the old days.  Rudyard Kipling  was probably considered very clever when he came up with: 'For heathen heart that puts her trust / In reeking tube and iron shard...'   
But it's attaching the 'shhh... you know what' word to things that aren't actual shards that really rankles with the literati and criterati: 'a single shard of moonlight' may incite 'shard-like anger'.  And the fact that they pop up  everywhere: shards of light, shards of memory, shards of love, contempt, hate, fear and , bizarrely, shards of spring - that must be what I cut my finger on in the garden.
Some CLEVER poets get around this by writing poems about real shards - glass, or fragments of rock or earthenware, bits of old tin can even: '...only he could eyeball an ancient shard of London Lite from / 100 metres in the pitch black'  (closing words of Tube Poem by Archie Thomas).   I was very clever NOT using it in my (ahem, 'award-winning', well, runner-up) poem The world is made of glass.  Because gosh, I wanted to.
Why is it so wrong?  Is it too easy or has it just been used to death, become familiar as a 'poetic' word and therefore contemptible?  Anne Rouse in The Richmond Review  agrees: "...poetic diction has a brief shelf-life; once a word has had currency, it must change itself by ironic or other means, or else risk belatedness and parody."
And so we must desist.  Scour your poetry and prose, strike them out, pick them away like the splinters they are!  Put the shard down and step away from the poem!  And go on - 'fess up.  Have you used it?  Have YOU?

p.s.  I don't normally go back to blogs once they're lit - but I have to add in this link the lovely Moptop just sent me (18 March) to the Joy of Shards website, and the article about use of 'found' objects to create a whole piece of art - and isn't that a little bit like writing, huh?  Enjoy!