Archive for the 'Wordwatch' Category

I’ve been re-working the draft of my third novel Tianming Traviata recently.

The novel is an off-beat family drama with a cast of quirky, colourful characters. The main character is a 70-year old cabaret singer, Evie, who is still going strong in her sequinned gowns and feather headdresses. She owns the only nightclub in a small town in Malaysia and sings old show tunes, with the “grand dame” air of days gone by. Her neice Kit-Mei works as software programmer in Kuala Lumpur, a blogging, city-slicking modern young woman who is very much part of 21st century Malaysia. The family are thrown into crisis when Evie’s daughter disappears and the clash between the old and the new generations are brought to a head.

I had been writing it in Standard English using a third person narrative structure. It was zipping along nicely - but it just lacked “oomph” and I was finding that I was getting bored. The dialogue bits were fine when Evie was in the thick of the action. But the narrative was just lacklustre. Now, if the author is bored by the novel, there’s no hope that the narrative will be able to grip others!

So I put it away for several months. Then a few weeks ago, Evie’s voice kept coming back to me. In the dialogue bits, she is in full flow, loud and raucous and full of energy - speaking in Malaysian English. In contrast, the third person narrative was in measured, proper, sensible full sentences with proper syntax, grammar and punctuation.

And I thought, why not try writing the narrative bits in Malaysian English? Yah, why not-lah? So stupid I was before. This one is Evie’s story-lah so, of course, got to tell it with her voice, isn’t it?

Since then, I’ve had such fun getting the narrative down in the voice of a 70 year old cabaret singer who will not let her arthritic hip stop her doing high-kicks and whose language is full of verve and peppered with “-lah”s.

When I’ve got a bit further along with the text, I will upload a podcast reading of the first chapter so you can see what you think. In particulary, I would be interested to see the response of Malaysians to the use of our form of the English language in fiction.

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To hear what Malaysian English sounds like in contrast to Standard UK English, listen to my podcast “Two Voices” about my “schizophrenic” relationship with language.

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I will write more next week about “-lah” and its use in Malaysian English.

On Tuesday, I posted a link to Hanzi Smatter, the site dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture, highlighting tattoos that don’t say quite what the owner thinks they say.

The counterpoint site is Engrish.com which highlights oddball uses of English - mainly from Japan, where it’s trendy to use Western words as part of a design pattern. Go see for yourself at http://www.engrish.com.

My favourite is this funky use of the lovely-shaped word “Dank” to sell bread ….

Photo: from Engrish.com

During our holiday in Cornwall, we visited Newquay, once a fishing village and now a prime destination for surfers from all over the world. The town sprawls down the clifftop nestled within several magnificent bays where the surf rides dramatically into shore. High cliffs circle the bays like fortress walls.

Just outside the main town, perched on the very edge of a soaring clifftop, is the historic Huers Hut. Made of stone, it looks like a white-washed domed temple that might just as easily have been in Greece. Its curved walls face the land while an open patio looks out to sea, a giant fireplace and chimney taking up most of space inside.

In the fourteenth century, this was where the huer would stand watch, gazing out to the vast ocean waiting for the pilchards. When he saw the shoals of fish, he would raise the hue and cry to alert the fishermen in the village and they would rush out to launch their boats and head to catch their precious livelihood. Standing on the cliff top, the huer would direct the boats towards the pilchards like a general mustering his army, using hand signals and calls.

The pilchards have declined and commercial fishing is not enough to sustain the people of Newquay. But “raising the hue and cry” remains.

I was on my way to work on the bus the other day when I passed a glass fronted shop with a curved awning. An arc of words across the large pane said, “Tony’s Cafe”. I couldn’t see clearly inside from where I sat on the double-decker but I knew it wasn’t a “café” but a “caff”.

A “café” (with a fancy French accent on the “e” and pronounced “caf-fay”) is where they serve fancy coffees like cappuccino and lattes and you sit in stylish chairs at carefully placed small tables and watch the world go by. Or write your novel on a shiny laptop. Or kiss your friends on both cheeks when they join you. Or read the latest Booker prize winner.

A “cafe” (with no fancy “e” on the end and pronounced “caff”) is where they serve tea so strong it puts hairs on your chest but they couldn’t make decent coffee to save their lives and they make great, greasy fry-up English breakfasts that will have you dropping dead at an early age and where you say “awright, mate?” when your friends come by or you sit and read a tabloid.

A café is in a fancy part of town like Covent Garden and a caff, like the one I passed, is in somewhere like the Walworth Road in South London.

In Malaysia, the equivalent of a “caff” is a coffeeshop where they make strong, sweet “kopi” or “teh” with evaporated or condensed milk and do mean fried noodles and “chicken chop”. Are there many of these left any more? Or have they all been globalised into Starbucks and Gloria Jeans Coffeehouse?

I love a café when I’m in the mood to be in my head and “un peu intellecto” as they might say in Paris. But I adore caffs and coffeeshops when I’m in the mood to be down-to-earth and scruffy and to eat some tasty fried food. Crispy bacon and sausages with fried eggs and baked beans and fried tomatoes and mushrooms on the side plus a couple of slices of toasted white bread dripping with butter – or better yet, fried bread! I’ll take that any day over a precious little croissant.

To borrow a line from Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of frying bacon in the morning.”

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This is a new, occasional series on words and language. When I was a child, I loved reading the dictionary and learning new words. I loved their sounds and the depth and the layers of meaning waiting to be unwrapped. Words and language evolve all the time - from the clash of cultures when the Vikings and Germans and Normans invaded Britain through the Great Vowel Shift in medieval times to the local flavour that Commonwealth countries splash into their versions of English and the impact of new technologies and new sub-cultures on traditional usage. I hope you will take part in this series by sharing your experiences of how language is used wherever in the world you live and also suggesting words or aspects of language to explore.