The Sheepcat

First It Was Clinton's Bosnian Snipers

... and now it looks as if there will have been some high drama during the still-to-come papal tour, according to this CBS story.

Pope Benedict XVI will visit a synagogue led by a rabbi who survived the Holocaust during his first papal trip to the United States, the nation's bishops said Thursday.

I suppose journalists have it drummed into them to get to the verb speedily, so moving "During his first papal trip" to the beginning of the sentence might make some readers fall asleep, but still, that's one badly misplaced modifier.

New Journal of Canadian Catholic Culture

The Alexandrian, named after St Catherine of Alexandria, patroness of Christian philosophers, has just published its second quarterly issue, on the Lenten theme of suffering. The attractively designed online journal, produced by a team of young Canadian Catholics who dream of cultural renewal, carries poetry, art, short fiction, and philosophy. The premier issue explored the theme of choice.

Check it out, and come back soon to the companion blog, which apparently has some temporary technical problems at the moment.

Conjugate Well Today

Knowing that March 4 is National Grammar Day, all sentences should be purged of participles, that dangle, and thereby cause confusion. A box of Smarties to the first reader to identify all three errors in this post. Members of the Editors' Association of Canada are not eligible.

Writer's Block Again

[My son Sean] tells me his trouble is that he gets part way into the story and then thinks "This sucks" and stops writing. I told him, "Do you know what that makes you? An absolutely normal writer. The trick is not to let the bits that suck make you give up on the whole thing. That's the great thing about writing. You can go back and make it something else right up till the moment they publish it."--Mark Shea.

Now I just need to apply that advice to the project I've been struggling with for the last while.

Inclusive Language

Catholic Culture has a fascinating essay called "Jesus, Son of Humankind? The Necessary Failure of Inclusive-Language Translations." The author, Paul Mankowski, S.J., remarks, "I shall principally use biblical and Roman Catholic liturgical texts to illustrate my remarks; however, with one exception, my arguments presume no specifically theological interests or allegiance, and the conclusions apply to translation generally."

He distinguishes inclusive language from organic linguistic change by the nature of the slippages that occur.

For example, if a female apprentice zookeeper were to stray into an area around which the notice was posted, "Warning! Man-eating Tiger!" in the belief that "man-eating" did not apply to women, this would indicate empirically that "man" has lost the meaning which inclusivists claim it has.

The project that is termed "inclusive language" is in fact an etiquette. As an etiquette it is a complex system of rules, mainly prohibitions, used to encourage certain attitudes and types of behavior and discourage others, and to allow those who accept a particular code of conduct to recognize both conformists and non-conformists. This etiquette operates in the service of feminism in the broadest sense; to adopt inclusive language is to signal, if not personal agreement with specific feminist claims, at least a personal unwillingness to risk social unpleasantness resulting from rejection of such claims.

The essay is long but well worth reading.

Omit Words!

No way to neatly summarize this amusing riff on Strunk and White's famous advice "Omit needless words." So just go read it already.

Thomas Sowell on Writing and Editing

Thomas Sowell slices and dices his way through the publishing thicket.

Instead of trying to be someone that you are not, be the best at what you are. My own writing practices are the direct opposite of that followed by these prolific and renowned writers. I write only when I have something to say. The big disadvantage of this is that it can mean a lot of down time. There are manuscripts of mine that sat around gathering dust for years without a word being added to them. How then have I managed to write more than 20 books within the Biblical threescore and ten years?

He reserves especial scorn for incompetent copy-editors …

If there is any rhyme or reason to the way editing varies from one editor to another, it seems to be this: The less the editor has written under his own name, the more he wants to write under someone else’s name. An editor who has written a couple of best sellers is likely to be much less intrusive than an English major fresh out of college.

For reasons unknown, some copy-editors seem to think that words with similar sounds are substitutes for one another. But there is a big difference between Londonderry air and London derriere.

… by which he apparently means most of us.

But don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe that all editors should be shot at sunrise; Midge Decter is an exception. So is Jim Michaels, who edited Forbes magazine for many years. If I thought about it for another day or so, I might come up with a third example.

Then there are book reviewers who haven't read the book, radio interviewers who haven't read the book …

Good skewering. Just remind me never to cross him.

Orson Scott Card On Religion in SF and Fantasy

Moira Allen of Writing-World.com interviewed novelist Orson Scott Card a few years ago.

The hostility toward religion among American intellectuals arises, I think, from a clear awareness that it was against a publicly religious culture that their own culture rebelled. Now that rebellion is completely successful in terms of capturing control of all the public instruments of transmission of culture-- the universities, the media, and the literature and art-- but it has become such a shibboleth of intellectual life to snipe at religion that, like the aging "revolutionaries" of the old Soviet Union, they mindlessly continue to "rebel" in order to defend their tight grip on the establishment. Indeed, those intellectuals are the establishment. And what was once a daring and rebellious stance is now just another example of lockstep conformists mindlessly echoing ideas that they haven't examined.

…

In our culture, intellectuals have become so uniformly a-religious or anti-religious that our fiction, with few exceptions, depicts religious people in only two ways: the followers are ignorant and stupid and easily fooled, and the leaders are exploitative and cynical, manipulating others' faith for their private benefit.

That's when contemporary fiction mentions religion at all. Most of the time, in and out of speculative fiction, religion simply doesn't exist. Characters don't believe in God or even think about believing in God. Nobody talks about religion. Nobody belongs to any kind of church. Religion simply doesn't exist.

…

The honest depicter of human life will include the religious aspect of that life. This is not to say that stories need to be about religion, any more than stories about our contemporary culture need to be about cars. But the cars need to be present, at least by implication, and if a character doesn't know how to drive, we'd need to know why.

Card is Mormon, incidentally. Or maybe not incidentally.

The Eggcorn Database

If you've ever towed the line or given free reign to your feelings, you'll want to know about The Eggcorn Database.

So is this another collection of common errors, ridiculous bloopers or, worse, finger-wagging at the decline of the English tongue? Well, no. While compilations of the first type can be very useful (and I recommend Paul Brians' site Common Errors in English), ridiculing and pontificating, while an entertaining pastime, has long struck me as childish and, indeed, lacking any intrinsic interest.

Here, we take the stance that the errors we collect — and they are lexical errors, no doubt about that — are noteworthy because they are interesting. They tell us something about how ordinary speakers and writers make sense of the language they use. And eggcorns are not like just any amusing erroneous substitution: they are special because they arise when a writer knows an expression well enough to employ it in an appropriate context, but is mistaken about the term's or its constituents' meanings, origins or the underlininglying metaphors.

Some not-so-Honourable Members: Here, here!

Blog Roundup

Good news to see that David Morrison of Sed Contra is back at the keyboard following some time away after his father passed away. Good posts on chastity and the misrepresentation of the Courage Apostolate by a dissident group claiming to be Catholic while rejecting the Church's teachings on homosexuality.

I recently came across Muttering in Manitoba, which blogger Mutt-Man bills as "Politics, religion, humour and other dangerous topics, by conservative Western Canadians." I like his self-deprecating sense of humour. Perhaps modesty prevents him from mentioning that he's also got some terrific photography.

Speaking of photography, daily dose of imagery has been my favourite photoblog since some time before I started blogging, but I realized lately that I've rarely if ever linked to it in the body of this blog. A few recent highlights, according my own taste. But check out Sam's archives to see the full range of his work, all arranged by category or date.

Fellow Canadian Marcia Laycock has graceful words to share from time to time at Spurts. Marcia explains,

The title of this blog, like the title of my book, The Spur of the Moment, is taken from Hebrews 10:24 - "Let us consider how to spur one another on toward love and good deeds."

More active of late is her other blog, Writer-lee. She won the 2006 Best New Canadian Christian Author Award for her forthcoming novel, One Smooth Stone. Here's how she explains the genesis of the story.

It was born one Sunday after a woman from a local crisis pregnancy centre gave a talk at our church. I chatted with her afterwards (I had worked on the hotline for her organization) and we got talking about abortion. She said, "Can you imagine what it would be like for someone to discover his mother had tried to abort him?" I could and did and now it's going to be a book.

And journalist/author Deborah Gyapong, who interviewed me last year about that priest in Montreal who is so unwilling to accept Church teaching on homosexuality, has lots of good material. Here's her own contribution to the safe-versus-good thread from Relapsed Catholic that I posted on just the other day. First, responding to a review complaining that her newly published novel, The Defilers, was disturbing, she writes:

Well--if a novel that deals with issues of child pornography, and demonic oppression is not disquieting, then I have failed as an artist. Readers who want to lull themselves to sleep with sanitized entertainment can read another book. There is lots of product out there for them. I hope people will be disturbed. I hope that the novel will make them think about how their own heart is a battleground between good and evil and that ultimately they will choose the good, but not without their eyes wide open.

Then in a follow-up:

I think the Left Behind series is bad art and consequently bad religion, though perhaps many people find they're prompted to say the Sinner's Prayer after reading one of these books about the End Times. And maybe some of those people are genuinely repenting. God can even make a donkey speak if He has to in order to reach someone, but that doesn't make the donkey anything other than a donkey.

I love it! Deb also links to this provocative essay, Why Evangelicals Can't Write, by one Peter Leithart:

Here is a thesis, which I offer in a gleeful fit of reductionism: Modern Protestants can't write because we have no sacramental theology. Protestants will learn to write when we have reckoned with the tragic results of Marburg, and have exorcised the ghost of Zwingli from our poetics.

The Defilers is a very good read, by the way, with well-drawn characters and a compelling plot. Check it out.